In this delicately rendered tempera, Siegfried stands atop the mountains at the mouth of the cave in which Brünnhilde is held captive, in Act III of the opera. In Wagner’s Ring only the strongest hero could pass through the Ring of Fire that Loki set to guard Brünnhilde, and yet Armfield’s Siegfried is elfin and slight, wind swept and apprehensive as he pauses to draw his sword to set the maiden free, at which moment he will at last ‘know fear’.

Armfield's image of a pre-sexual Siegfried, an uncorrupted hero, is likely to be derived from Aubrey Beardsley, who at the age of 19 was encouraged to give up clerking and become an artist by Burne-Jones, who, like Armfield, was originally from Birmingham. Armfield had joined the Birmingham schools in 1899, and was deeply influenced by the Burne-Jones paintings in the Art Gallery. Beardsley gave Burne-Jones a superb early drawing of Siegfried in Act II, with the dragon Fafnir slain at his feet, that Burne-Jones hung next to his Dürer engravings. They both died seven years later, in 1898. Beardsley was only 25.