Lotte Motz
| Lotte Motz | |
|---|---|
| Born | Lotte Edlis August 16, 1922 Austria |
| Died | December 24, 1997 |
| Genre | Mythology, Folklore |
Lotte Motz, born Lotte Edlis, (August 16, 1922 – December 24, 1997) was an Austrian-American scholar who published four books and many scholarly papers, primarily in the fields of Germanic mythology and folklore.
Lotte Motz's family left Austria in 1941, following the Anschluss. She earned her B.A. from Hunter College and pursued her graduate studies at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin, obtaining a Ph.D. in German and philology from the latter institution in 1955. She later earned a BPhil at the University of Oxford in Old English. Motz obtained an academic position in the German language department at Brooklyn College and also taught at Hunter College. After she retired from teaching due to illness in 1984, Motz's research interests came to focus on female figures in Germanic mythology, especially the nature and function of giantesses.
According to Rudolf Simek, Motz was "never afraid to attack the icons of scholarship if she believed the truth to be elsewhere," noting that:
[Motz] was thus the first scholar in recent history to question the truth behind the goddess Nerthus in Tacitus' Germania, the name being only one of several possible manuscript readings, thus opening up new paths of thought on early Germanic religion. Lotte Motz was certainly the first scholar in our field to take a serious step past the Three-Function-Theory developed by Georges Dumezil nearly four decades ago."
Jenny Jochens cites six of Motz’s titles in the bibliography to her Old Norse Images of Women, and Andy Orchard cites sixteen of Motz’s works in endnotes to entries in his Dictionary of Norse Myth and Legend. Motz’s research into the role of giants in Northern mythology has been cited by several scholars. Her inquiries into the nature of dwarfs in myth and folklore have also been widely influential.
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