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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: grandfather's majestic entanglements with law, and the night of
his father's tragic struggle with it.
The First Act
Mimmy's smithy is a cave, in which he hides from the light like
the eyeless fish of the American caverns. Before the curtain
rises the music already tells us that we are groping in darkness.
When it does rise Mimmy is in difficulties. He is trying to make
a sword for his nursling, who is now big enough to take the field
against Fafnir. Mimmy can make mischievous swords; but it is not
with dwarf made weapons that heroic man will hew the way of his
own will through religions and governments and plutocracies and
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