Lotte Motz

• 1. Introduction

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  Lotte Motz was born on the 16th of August 1922, in Austria, and she spent the better part of four decades quietly transforming how scholars think about Norse gods, giants, dwarfs, and goddesses. She published four books and dozens of scholarly papers. She retired from teaching due to illness in 1984. And yet, some of her most searching and controversial work came after that retirement. What drove a philologist trained in German and Old English to question the foundations of an entire field? What made her the first scholar, according to colleagues, to seriously challenge the Three-Function Theory that had defined Germanic mythology studies for nearly four decades? And why did a conference at Bonn University gather in her honor, two years after her death, to continue the arguments she started?

• 2. Flight and Formation

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  Lotte Motz was born Lotte Edlis, and her family left Austria in 1941, in the wake of the Anschluss. That displacement shaped the geography of her education. She earned her B.A. at Hunter College in New York, then moved west for graduate work at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin. Wisconsin awarded her a Ph.D. in German and philology in 1955. She did not stop there. Motz later completed a D.Phil. at the University of Oxford, this time in Old English, giving her an unusually wide philological range across the Germanic languages. She eventually joined the German language department at Brooklyn College and also taught at Hunter College, the same institution where she had taken her first degree. When illness forced her to retire from teaching in 1984, her scholarly gaze turned with new focus toward female figures in Germanic mythology, particularly the nature and function of giantesses.

• 3. Questioning the Foundations

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  Rudolf Simek, who knew Motz's work well, described her as "never afraid to attack the icons of scholarship if she believed the truth to be elsewhere." The clearest example of that instinct was her challenge to the goddess Nerthus, a figure from Tacitus's Germania who had long been treated as settled fact in the field. Motz was the first scholar in recent times, Simek noted, to question whether Nerthus was real at all, arguing that the name was only one of several possible readings of the manuscript. By pulling at that thread, she opened what Simek called "new paths of thought on early Germanic religion." Her other major challenge targeted the Three-Function Theory developed by the French scholar Georges Dumezil. Simek credited Motz as the first scholar in the field to take a serious step past that theory, which had been dominant for nearly four decades. Motz proposed that the Vanir gods, commonly labeled as deities of fertility and wealth, were in fact a complete divine family with as wide a range of functions as the Æsir, and that the Æsir had a stronger affinity to agriculture while the Vanir leaned toward navigation. She attributed the difference to different invasion routes into Scandinavia, land routes to Denmark and sea routes to Sweden and Norway, bringing distinct cultural substrates with them.

• 4. Giants, Dwarfs, and Giantesses

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  Motz's research into the role of giants in Northern mythology attracted wide citation among scholars working in the field. Her inquiries into dwarfs proved equally influential. Margaret Clunies Ross credits Motz as the first to recognize that the dwarfs of Norse mythology "were an all-male group," an observation Clunies Ross incorporated into her own theory of negative reciprocity. The question of giants was more contested. A series of articles Motz published in the 1980s argued that giants represented a group of older deities pushed aside as patterns of worship changed over time. Clunies Ross rejected that conclusion, calling it speculation without textual or other evidence, while acknowledging that ancient beliefs may have allowed more beings into the giant category in regional Norwegian traditions than in the version of Norse mythology preserved by Snorri Sturluson. Motz's work on the Eddic poem Svipdagsmál offered another distinctive reading: she proposed that the poem described an initiatory ritual into a mother goddess cult, with the hero Svipdag's journey to Menglöð's hall serving as the central action. Christopher Abram cited that interpretation in 2006. John McKinnell engaged it closely, agreeing with Motz that the word aptr, indicating Menglöð welcomes Svipdag back, should not be removed from the text without justification, though McKinnell ultimately rejected her thesis, arguing there was no need to identify Menglöð with Gróa.

• 5. A Provocative Last Book

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  Motz's 1996 book, The King, the Champion and the Sorcerer, drew pointed criticism from Jens Peter Schjødt, associate professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. Schjødt observed that Motz had essentially inverted the standard Indo-European theory, arguing that common traits shared between Indo-European cultures and the Mediterranean world came from borrowings out of the Mediterranean rather than from a shared common origin. She proposed that the division between the Æsir and Vanir arose from two separate peoples arriving in Scandinavia, a historicist model that Schjødt linked to earlier work by Karl Helm in 1913 and Ernst A. Phillipsson in 1953. Schjødt found interesting ideas in the book but argued it failed to make a convincing case, largely because it did not engage with the comparative arguments Dumezil had assembled from across the Indo-European world. Her final book, The Faces of the Goddess, appeared in 1997 from Oxford University Press in New York and Oxford, the year Motz died on the 24th of December.

• 6. Legacy and Commemoration

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  Jenny Jochens cited six of Motz's titles in the bibliography to her Old Norse Images of Women. Andy Orchard cited sixteen of Motz's works in endnotes to his Dictionary of Norse Myth and Legend, a measure of how broadly her output had spread through the scholarly literature. Motz was posthumously honored with a conference held in her memory at Bonn University in 1999, two years after her death. The workshop produced a commemorative volume of eleven scholarly works, written in both German and English, on the subject of female entities in Northern mythology. The thread she had followed most closely after retiring from teaching, the question of what giantesses were and what they meant, became the organizing subject of that final tribute. Three of her posthumously published papers, including one on the sky god of the Indo-Europeans and one titled "The Great Goddess of the North," appeared in 1998, keeping her arguments in circulation even after she was gone.