Short answers, pulled from the story.
Lotte Motz (born the 16th of August 1922, died the 24th of December 1997) was an Austrian-American scholar who held a Ph.D. in German and philology and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in Old English. She published four books and many scholarly papers focused on Germanic mythology and folklore, and is recognized for being the first scholar to seriously challenge Georges Dumezil's Three-Function Theory in the field.
Motz earned her B.A. at Hunter College, pursued graduate studies at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin (where she received her Ph.D. in 1955), and later completed a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford. She taught in the German language department at Brooklyn College and also at Hunter College.
Motz's family left Austria in 1941, following the Anschluss.
Motz argued that the Vanir, commonly described as deities of fertility and wealth, were actually a complete divine family with as broad a range of functions as the Æsir. She proposed that the Æsir had a stronger affinity to agriculture and the Vanir to navigation, a difference she attributed to different invasion routes into Scandinavia, one overland to Denmark and one by ship to Sweden and Norway.
Motz was the first scholar to recognize that the dwarfs of Norse mythology were an all-male group. Margaret Clunies Ross cited this observation in support of her own theory of negative reciprocity.
Motz was posthumously honored with a conference held in her memory at Bonn University in 1999. The workshop resulted in a commemorative volume of eleven scholarly works in German and English, all concerning female entities in Northern mythology.