Well, it seems that John Roberts opened the floodgates on this one! Thanks for the interest, folks - it's fun that "my baby", The Ring of the Nibelung (abridged), has finally made it out into the world. I wrote this parody back in 1992 or so, and have been singing it around ever since. I sang the song for Nathan Rogers, Stan's son, at a festival one year, and he loved it. He said to go ahead and sing it wherever I wanted - but if I recorded it without permission from the Rogers estate, he's sue the pants off me!

I give the words out freely to folks who ask for it, but I'd prefer to only pass them on to folks who've actually heard the song, whether sung by me, or Micca, or John Roberts, etc. The phrasing, the correct pronunciation of names (it's By-royt, fer instance, not Bay-royth, as one might assume from the spelling) are important, and can't be easily picked up just from a piece of paper. This is why I've asked that the words not be posted on Mudcat or in SingOut, etc. I'd also like to get whatever dubious credit there may be for writing the thing, and words that get passed around on the Internet frequently lose the author's name rather quickly.

If you've heard the song and enjoyed it, send me a PM with your email address and I'll send you an illustrated PDF, with pictures stolen from the above mentioned Arthur Rackham and German Wagnerian postcard sites and from a couple of Pagan Ring websites that specialize in Norse mythology:

http://www.artpassions.net/rackham/wagner_ring.html
http://www.thetroth.org/gallery/ring
http://www.richard-wagner-postkarten.de/postkarten/sie.php
http://home.earthlink.net/~norsemyths/norsemyths.html

Those of you who have heard the Gospel according to Wagner (abridged), go forth and inflict it on new ears - it's better than sitting through four nights of the operas...