Like Paxson's Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth, which I tried just before this novel, this had been on my bookshelves unread for years. Also like that book, this could be seen as professional fan fiction of sorts. Or historical fantasy in the vein of Mary Renault and Mary Stewart, with Serpent dealing with the King Lear legend, while this book deals with the legends inspiring Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung. It could be the reason I couldn't get into this book is that this is the second part of the series, and I've never read the first book, The Wolf and the Raven, but given my reaction to Paxson's other book, I don't think so. I think there's just something in the author's style and themes I can't connect to.

I think it's that I find it all a little predictable, especially knowing the author's neopagan roots and close connections to Marion Zimmer Bradley, author of Mists of Avalon. It's as if I know what's going to come up before I even read it, especially since it seemed to be hewing pretty closely to Wagner's librettos. I thought the third person narrative flowed better than the first person of Serpent, but especially comparing it to similar books I don't think this added anything to the legends. Jack Whyte's take on the King Arthur legend, for instance, gave me a lot of pleasure in the clever ways it mixed myth and history, so that when the sword Excalibur turned out to be forged from a meteor, I was madly grinning. And with Colleen McCullough's Master of Rome series, I was impressed with how she rendered the Ancient Roman mindset, so when a classicist friend spoke of wanting dignitas in her career, I knew exactly what she meant. And Gillian Bradshaw's novels of the late Roman world didn't just enthrall by taking me to an ancient world, but immediately connected me to her characters. Compared to such novels, this felt routine. ( )