Wagner’s music and aesthetics have been extremely influential on various modern subcultures and fandoms.

As one fan wrote about the opera Die Walküre:  “Black Metal Is Wagner.”

The metal band Apocalyptica reimagines Wagner’s life:

As Sir Christopher Lee noted, “Metal is a direct evolution of the sounds Wagner imagined.”

Just to make worlds collide even harder: J.R.R. Tolkien used the same source material as Richard Wagner, though, as a patriotic Englishman and a hater of bigotry, he tried to deny it.

Read “The Ring and The Rings.”

Read “Tolkien, Wagner, and the Rings of Power.”

P.S. Just how metal is Wagner? Well, in the score of Das Rheingold, he calls for 18 ANVILS — nine small, six medium, and three large — to signify the metalwork of the dwarves.. The anvils are all tuned to F, three octaves apart, and are played offstage during a scene when two of the principal characters, Loge and Wotan, descend into Nibelheim, the underground land of the dwarves.