As I was reading the new Avengers book (He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: The Untold Romance Between Steed and Mrs Peel), I came upon a reference to the scene in “The Murder Market” where Emma plays Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” on Steed’s tuba, which leads the book’s authors to compare Mrs Peel to the Valkyrie Brunhilde. (77) This image set the little grey cells a-humming as I thought, “By golly, that is absolutely true.”
I therefore propose to discuss some points of contact between Mrs Peel and Brunhilde (who I shall call Brynhild, which is an Old Norse version of the name) and between Steed and Sigurd (called Siegfried in Wagner’s Ring and in the medieval German Nibelungenlied). Now, I’m not saying that Diana Rigg, Patrick Macnee, or the creators of The Avengers consciously chose to make Mrs Peel a sort of avatar of Brynhild or Steed a sort of avatar of Sigurd, just that I find some interesting confluences between Mrs Peel’s relationships with Steed and Peter Peel on the one hand, and Brynhild’s relationships with Sigurd and Gunnar on the other, as well as several other elements that appear to run parallel among these characters, both ancient and modern.
Feather Dusters at 400 Yards 