Do other parents have conversations like this?
"Do you want me to read you the synopsis of Act II of Goetterdammerung, or a baby book?"
"Act II of Goetterdammerung, then a baby book, Daddy!"
This came out of the fact that when I picked her up from school the other day, Act III of Siegfried was on Radio 3 and took her fancy (the bit where Brunnhilde wakes up and starts going "Heil dir Sonne, heil dir Tag chiz chiz" like some demented soppy girl in a Molesworth story). Anyway, I went to the bookshelves and found dusty and long-untouched copies of Ernest Newman's 'Wagner Nights' and a Wagner biography which had a synopsis of the Ring cycle, and started reading an act a night as part of the bedtime story session.
And yes, The Ring makes a great kids' story. My mind started wandering (just call me Der Wanderer...) and imagining what Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton or Dr Seuss would have made of the plotline. Doubtless my attempts at extracts will follow at some point.
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Whenever I needed my dear little twins to fall asleep quickly, I always relied on the tale of the Norns spinning the Rope of Destiny (from the prologue). Told in a suitably dreary voice, with absolutely no coughing, and plenty of "... and then the Norns .... and then the Norns ...", will send any child to the land of Nod in about 15 minutes. They never asked what a Norn was, incidentally, and never have. Eltern haften fur ihre Kinder (sorry, no umlauts).
Excellent, if only Wagner's Ring Cycle had been a Molesworth story: we'd have heard nothing of Hitler or Michael Portillo or any of the other wrongly-over-achieving glory-deluded fans of it. As any fool kno.
I scorn him uterly.
In fact, The Ring as told by one's favourite children's writer sounds like the sort of literary exercise I like.
I'll listen to The Ring a couple of times and get back to you.
p.s. I wasn't suggesting that you, Gyppo, or anybody else here who might want to be my friend is "a glory-deluded fool"; I just know that a few of these people do exist elsewhere. And I was feeling a little feisty.
Oops, should have been "As any fule kno"....I forgot to set my spellchecker to English (Molesworth).
Same here Gadjo, mind should have been
"I diskard him uterly".
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