The Rhinemaidens are the three water-nymphs who appear in Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring Des Nibelungen. Their individual names are Woglinde, Wellgunde, and Flosshilde, although they are generally considered as a single entity and act together accordingly. Of the 34 characters in the Ring cycle, they are the only ones who do not originate in the Scandinavian Eddas. Other legends and myths on which Wagner drew, notably the Nibelungenlied, include stories that involve water-sprites (nixies) or mermaids, and it is likely that he created his Rhinemaidens from these sources. The key concepts associated with them in the Ring operas—their flawed guardianship of the Rhine gold, and the condition (renunciation of love) through which the gold could be stolen from them and transformed into a means of world power—are wholly Wagner's own invention, and are the elements that initiate and propel the entire drama. The Rhinemaidens are the first and the last characters to be seen in the operas, appearing both in the opening scene of Das Rheingold, and in the final climactic spectacle of Götterdämmerung when they rise from the Rhine waters to reclaim the ring from Brünnhilde's ashes. They have no relationship to any of the other characters, and no indication is given as to how they came into being, beyond occasional references to an unspecified "father". Read the rest of this article: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinemaidens> _______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries: 1257: Kraków in Poland received city rights. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krak%C3%B3w> 1305: Raymond Bertrand de Got became Pope Clement V, succeeding Pope Benedict XI who died one year earlier. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Clement_V> 1832: The June Rebellion, a anti-monarchist uprising of students, broke out in Paris. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Rebellion> 1967: The Six-Day War began with an Israeli Air Force preemptive strike that destroyed about 450 total aircraft of the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian Air Forces on the ground. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Focus> 1968: Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan mortally shot U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy inside the kitchen pantry of The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, an event that has spawned a variety of conspiracy theories. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_assassination> 1995: A new phase of matter, the Bose–Einstein condensate, was produced for the first time by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado at Boulder NIST-JILA lab. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensate> _____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day: shufti (n): A brief glance; a quick look <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shufti> ___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day: Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking. --John Maynard Keynes <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes>