The word for “settler” among the Vikings was “Landnám’s man”; the first arrival in an area “took” the land and named it. There was a lexicon of settlement, made up of family names and the names for geographic features, descriptions of the kinds of settlements, and relationships between them.

“Torp,” for instance, referred to an outlying settlement. Closer to home, the University of Washington has an Odegaard Library — “ødegård” means “deserted” (øde) “farm” (gård). When Peter Puget’s name was affixed to “Sund” (all right, “Sound”), it was in the Viking way.

Viking ways, like Vikings, die hard. Scandinavian settlement of the Northwest was fading in memory when, in 1975, Seattle Opera started producing Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. To Glynn Ross, the son of a Norwegian (Swedish on his mother’s side), the idea of Wagner’s repackaging of Norse sagas being repackaged for Seattle was entrancing — as entrancing as he bet his audience would find them. It was a mammoth undertaking, gladly taken up by the Opera’s second general director, Speight Jenkins, when he arrived in the mid-’80s.

It was Jenkins who oversaw the evolution of two new Ring productions. Swept away were the fantasies of horned helmets. The second production from director François Rochaix and designer Robert Israel was “post-modern,” declared the Los Angeles Times, a conceptual homage to the 19th-century man of theatre and egomaniac responsible for the Ring. (It was also “pre-steampunk” in its refashioning of mechanical dragons.) Booed initially, by a few, it became beloved.

But the cultural grafting showed it had taken root firmest with the inauguration of a third Ring production. For this “green” Ring, directed by Stephen Wadsworth, designed by Thomas Lynch, the concept was virtually invisible to Northwest residents. The breathtaking scenery was taken from the region, from its rivers, forests, and mountainsides.

At Bayreuth this year, to conflate for brevity, trailer-park residents splashed in oil while dodging crocodiles. This isn’t an off-Wagner pitch, really; the composer tackled a lot in the 16 hours or so of the Ring cycle, and rise of the industrial era and its reliance on extractive technologies is baked into his operas. But Wagner’s sprawling masterwork tends to wear holes in restrictive, delimiting directorial concepts by the time Valhalla burns.

At Seattle Opera, under Jenkins, the goal has been to let the Ring illuminate more, to burn brighter. Wadsworth has grappled with the task of helping audiences engage with what’s there, to see the humanity in mythic characters. Lynch’s scenic design, based literally on what’s described, foregrounds the Northwest environment not merely because of the natural beauty that visitors to Seattle invariably remark upon, but because that’s the crux of the saga, the relationship that people have with nature extends to the way they treat each other.

You don’t have to be evil to be mistaken, or to have made hard choices. As Vikings learned to their chagrin, their hard-won farming habits didn’t transplant well to every new land. Forests cut down sometimes did not grow back. Seemingly plentiful earth eroded away. Changes had to be made. As the Rhine daughters, swimming in Peter Kaczorowski’s silty light, sing for the return of their gold, a Northwesterner might muse about the undamming of rivers, and the cost in hydroelectric power.

But it’s not the reticent Seattle way to buttonhole and insist; rather, the production suggests, with an Asgard that, in the distance, looks a bit like Paradise on Mount Rainier, that this is home.

This summer marks the final presentation of the third production, which seems already as ageless as that rumbling, low E-flat with which Das Rheingold begins. Conductor Asher Fisch molds the orchestra into a protean landscape (and sound-effects machine); it gurgles as Alberich (Richard Paul Fink) clambers over slick rocks, falling heavily, working himself into a rage. It thumps with the steps of giants Fasolt (Andrea Silvestrelli) and Fafner (Daniel Sumegi). It storms as Donner (Markus Brück) swings his hammer.

Jenkins’s cast, replete with veterans, is perhaps the best I’ve heard in my years in Seattle. Hearing Greer Grimsley’s brash, ambitious Wotan tangle with Stephanie Blythe’s brilliantly expressive Fricka is enough to celebrate, but Fink’s multi-faceted Alberich is miles from any stock-character heavy. You get a strong sense of the contingency in life as he pivots from sadsack infatuation to grim material grasping, and Fink sings the differences, his voice yearning upwards with his straining arms, or growling at intruders. As Loge, Mark Schowalter unfurls a remarkably lyrical agility that snares listeners, despite any completely founded mistrust at whose side he’s on.

Wadsworth only occasionally gilds the lily when it comes to characterization — in Rheingold, it’s during Erda’s (Lucille Beer) apparition, as Wotan seems likely to, through greed and striving, doom Freya and by extension the gods (they need the apples, which only sounds like a Woody Allen joke). Erda is an eldritch spirit, the voice of Deep Being so to speak, but Wotan cuddles up to her like a little boy in his mom’s lap. It’s true, that’s a way of looking at the dynamic — Wotan is a needy child at his core — but Erda has never struck me as that kind of mom.

So it’s begun again. The last of three cycles concludes August 25. It’s the last Ring from Speight Jenkins — he’ll leave the Seattle Opera saga, as the formulation goes — but that’s how sagas work. In the telling, they come alive again.