Lotte Motz
Encyclopedia
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’s early essay on the Eddic poem, Svipdagsmál summarizes previous theories concerning the origin of the work and advanced a novel interpretation of the hero Svipdag’s journey to Menglöð’s hall. Motz proposed that the poem described an initiatory ritual into a mother goddess cult. As one of few commentaries on the poem, Motz’ interpretation of the poem was cited by Christopher Abram, (2006). and while John McKinnell noted that Motz “makes some telling points,” in her analysis, agreeing with Motz that the word aptr indicating that Menglöð welcomes Svipdag “back” should not be excised without justification. McKinnell disagreed with Motz’s thesis, stating: “[t]here is no need to identify Menglöð with Gróa, and the attempt to see Gróa’s spells as an initiatory ritual distorts the obvious meanings of several of them.”
Margaret Clunies Ross
disagrees with the conclusions of a series of articles Motz published in the 1980s, arguing that “the giants represent a group of older deities, pushed into the background of Viking Age consciousness by peoples’ changing patterns of worship,” noting that Motz’s argument “introduces an element of speculation into our understanding of Norse myth for which there is no textual or other evidence,” while graciously acknowledging the possibility that the ancient beliefs “may have allowed for the classification of more beings in the giant category in some traditions, particularly regional, Norwegian ones, than in that version of Norse mythology that Snorri Sturluson in particular handed down to us.” Elsewhere in the same volume, Clunies Ross cites Motz as being the first to recognize that the dwarfs of Norse mythology “were an all-male group,” an insight that Clunies Ross cites in support for her own theory of "negative reciprocity."
Regarding the relationship between the Æsir and Vanir, linguist Theo Vennemann
comments,
Jens Peter Schjødt, Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, observes:
A number of scholars cite articles by Motz in their bibliographies, including Eric Christiansen’s Norsemen in the Viking Age, and in the recent Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives (2006), including Henning Kure, “Hanging on the World Tree: Man and Cosmos in Old Norse Mythic Poetry,” Randi Haaland, “Iron in the Making–Technology and Symbolism,” and Sharon Ratke and Rudolf Simek, “Guldgrubber: Relics of Pre-Christian Law Rituals?”
Motz was posthumously honored with a conference held in her memory at Bonn University in 1999. This workshop resulted in the publication of a commemorative volume of eleven scholarly works in German and English concerning female entities in Northern mythology. Attendees contributing to the memorial volume include: Alexandra Pesch, Margrethe Watt, Rudolf Simek, Ute Schwab, Else Mundal, Wilhelm Heizmann, Anatoly Liberman, John McKinnell, Lise Præstgaard Anderson, and Ándís Egilsdóttir.
Germanic mythology
Germanic mythology is a comprehensive term for myths associated with historical Germanic paganism, including Norse mythology, Anglo-Saxon mythology, Continental Germanic mythology, and other versions of the mythologies of the Germanic peoples...
and folklore
Folklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...
.
Life
-Lotte Motz's family left Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
in 1941, following the Anschluss
Anschluss
The Anschluss , also known as the ', was the occupation and annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938....
. She earned her B.A. from Hunter College
Hunter College
Hunter College, established in 1870, is a public university and one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Hunter grants undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees in more than one hundred fields of study, and is recognized...
and pursued her graduate studies at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
and the University of Wisconsin, obtaining a Ph.D. in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
and philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
from the latter institution in 1955. She later earned a Bphil at the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
in Old English. Motz obtained an academic position in the German language department at Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...
and also taught at Hunter College
Hunter College
Hunter College, established in 1870, is a public university and one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Hunter grants undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees in more than one hundred fields of study, and is recognized...
. 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 NerthusNerthusIn Germanic paganism, Nerthus is a goddess associated with fertility. Nerthus is attested by Tacitus, the first century AD Roman historian, in his Germania. Various theories exist regarding the goddess and her potential later traces amongst the Germanic tribes...
in TacitusTacitusPublius Cornelius Tacitus was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire. The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories—examine the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors...
' GermaniaGermania (book)The Germania , written by Gaius Cornelius Tacitus around 98, is an ethnographic work on the Germanic tribes outside the Roman Empire.-Contents:...
, 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 DumezilGeorges DumézilGeorges Dumézil was a French comparative philologist best known for his analysis of sovereignty and power in Proto-Indo-European religion and society...
nearly four decades ago."
Reception of Motz's Scholarship
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.Motz’s early essay on the Eddic poem, Svipdagsmál summarizes previous theories concerning the origin of the work and advanced a novel interpretation of the hero Svipdag’s journey to Menglöð’s hall. Motz proposed that the poem described an initiatory ritual into a mother goddess cult. As one of few commentaries on the poem, Motz’ interpretation of the poem was cited by Christopher Abram, (2006). and while John McKinnell noted that Motz “makes some telling points,” in her analysis, agreeing with Motz that the word aptr indicating that Menglöð welcomes Svipdag “back” should not be excised without justification. McKinnell disagreed with Motz’s thesis, stating: “[t]here is no need to identify Menglöð with Gróa, and the attempt to see Gróa’s spells as an initiatory ritual distorts the obvious meanings of several of them.”
Margaret Clunies Ross
Margaret Clunies Ross
Margaret Clunies Ross is the McCaughey Professor of English Language and Early English Literature and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Sydney. Her main research areas are Old Norse-Icelandic Studies and the history of their study. Since 1997 she has led the project...
disagrees with the conclusions of a series of articles Motz published in the 1980s, arguing that “the giants represent a group of older deities, pushed into the background of Viking Age consciousness by peoples’ changing patterns of worship,” noting that Motz’s argument “introduces an element of speculation into our understanding of Norse myth for which there is no textual or other evidence,” while graciously acknowledging the possibility that the ancient beliefs “may have allowed for the classification of more beings in the giant category in some traditions, particularly regional, Norwegian ones, than in that version of Norse mythology that Snorri Sturluson in particular handed down to us.” Elsewhere in the same volume, Clunies Ross cites Motz as being the first to recognize that the dwarfs of Norse mythology “were an all-male group,” an insight that Clunies Ross cites in support for her own theory of "negative reciprocity."
Regarding the relationship between the Æsir and Vanir, linguist Theo Vennemann
Theo Vennemann
Theo Vennemann is a German linguist known best for his work on historical linguistics, especially for his disputed theories of a Vasconic substratum and an Atlantic superstratum of European languages. He also suggests that the High German consonant shift was already completed in the early 1st...
comments,
“The VanirVanirIn Norse mythology, the Vanir are a group of gods associated with fertility, wisdom and the ability to see the future. The Vanir are one of two groups of gods and are the namesake of the location Vanaheimr . After the Æsir–Vanir War, the Vanir became a subgroup of the Æsir...
are commonly presented as deities of fertility and wealth. This may be correct to a degree, but it is not a complete, or even adequate, description of the Vanir. In this critique I am in agreement with Lotte Motz (1976). Motz, too, stresses the fact that the Vanir are, like the ÆsirÆsirIn Old Norse, áss is the term denoting a member of the principal pantheon in Norse paganism. This pantheon includes Odin, Frigg, Thor, Baldr and Tyr. The second pantheon comprises the Vanir...
, a complete divine family with a wide range of functions, and also the fact that the Æsir have a stronger affinity to agriculture, the Vanir to navigation ... She accounts for this difference by assuming that it arose within Germanic as a function of different invasion routes – over land to Denmark, by ship to Sweden and Norway – and of different substrates.”
Jens Peter Schjødt, Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, observes:
"Motz more or less turned the Indo-European theory upside down and argued that common traits between the Indo-Europeans and the Mediterranean world are due to borrowings from the latter cultures, and that such traits were carried with the wandering Indo-European tribes to the North from the cultures of the Mediterreanean. In a rather strange way the author takes up the old historicist models of especially Karl Helm (1913) and Ernst A. Phillipsson (1953). She thus proposes that the division between the Æsir and Vanir is due to two different peoples arriving in Scandinavia (Motz 1996, 103-24). Although there are interesting ideas in the book it fails to make a convincing case for a historicist solution to be more plausible than the structuralist one of Dumézil, primarily because it does not take into consideration the overwhelming amount of comparative arguments which the French scholar brought forth from all over the Indo-European world, supporting, for instance, the proposition that the relationship between the two groups of gods is one of the basic strucral features of Indo-European mythology. As opposed to most other books on the subject in recent years, Motz is thus occupied which reconstructions of origins, which is, of course, quite legitimate, but she does it in a way that may be held rather old-fashioned."
A number of scholars cite articles by Motz in their bibliographies, including Eric Christiansen’s Norsemen in the Viking Age, and in the recent Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives (2006), including Henning Kure, “Hanging on the World Tree: Man and Cosmos in Old Norse Mythic Poetry,” Randi Haaland, “Iron in the Making–Technology and Symbolism,” and Sharon Ratke and Rudolf Simek, “Guldgrubber: Relics of Pre-Christian Law Rituals?”
Motz was posthumously honored with a conference held in her memory at Bonn University in 1999. This workshop resulted in the publication of a commemorative volume of eleven scholarly works in German and English concerning female entities in Northern mythology. Attendees contributing to the memorial volume include: Alexandra Pesch, Margrethe Watt, Rudolf Simek, Ute Schwab, Else Mundal, Wilhelm Heizmann, Anatoly Liberman, John McKinnell, Lise Præstgaard Anderson, and Ándís Egilsdóttir.
Publications
- 1973a. "New Thoughts on Dwarf-Names in Old Icelandic", Frühmittelalterliche Studien 7:100-117.
- 1973b. "Withdrawal and Return: A Ritual Pattern in the Grettis Saga", Arkiv för nordisk filologi 88:91-110.
- 1973/1974. "Of Elves and Dwarfs", Arv 29/30:93-127.
- 1975. "The King and the Goddess: An Interpretation of Svipdagsmal", Arkiv för nordisk filologi 90:133-150.
- 1976. "Burg-Berg, Burrow-Barrow", Indogermanische Forschungen 81:204-220.
- 1977. "The Craftsman in the Mound", Folklore 88:46-60.
- 1979. Driving Out the Elves: A Euphemism and a Theme of Folklore", Frühmittelalterliche Studien 13:439-441.
- 1979-1980. "The Rulers of The Mountain: A Study of the Giants of the Old Icelandic Texts", Mankind Quarterly 20: 393-416.
- 1980a. "Old Icelandic Völva: A New Derivation", Indogermanische Forschungen 85:196-206.
- 1980b. "Sister in the Cave: The Stature and the Function of the Female Figures of the Eddas", Arkiv för nordisk filologi 95:168-182.
- 1981a. "Gerðr: A New Interpretation of the Lay of Skirnir", Maal og Minne 121-136.
- 1981b. "Giantesses and their Names", Frühmittelalterliche Studien 15:495-511.
- 1982a. "Giants in Folklore and Mythology: A New Approach", Folklore 93:70–84.
- 1982b. "Freyja, Anat, Ishtar and Inanna: Some Cross-Cultural Comparisons", Mankind Quarterly 23:195-212.
- 1983. The Wise One of the Mountain: Form, Function and Significance of the Subterranean Smith: A Study in Folklore, Göppingen: Kümmerle. ISBN 3874525988.
- 1984a. "Giants and Giantesses:A Study in Norse Mythology and Belief", Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteran Germanistik 22:83-108.
- 1984b. "Gods and Demons of the Wilderness: A Study in Norse Tradition", Arkiv för nordisk filologi 99:175-187.
- 1984c. "The Winter Goddess: Percht, Holda and Related Figures", Folklore 95:151-166.
- 1984d. "Trolls and the Æsir: Lexical Evidence concerning North Germanic Faith", Indogermanische Forschungen 89:179-195.
- 1986. "New Thoughts on Volundarkviða", Saga-Book 22:50-68.
- 1987a. "Old Icelandic Giants and their Names", Frühmittelalterliche Studien 21:295-317.
- 1987b. "The Families of Giants", Arkiv för nordisk filologi 102:216–236.
- 1988. "The Storm of Troll-Women", Maal og Minne 31-41.
- 1991a. "The Cosmic Ash and other Trees of Germanic Myth", Arv 47:127-141.
- 1991b. “The Poets and the Goddess,” in Preprints of the Eighth International Saga Conference: The Audience of the Sagas (Lars Lönnroth, ed.), 2:127-33.
- 1992. "The Goddess Nerthus: A New Approach", Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 36:1-19.
- 1993a, The Beauty and the Hag: Female Figures of Germanic Faith and Myth. Wien: Fassbaender. ISBN 3900538409.
- 1993b. "Gullveig's Ordeal: A New Interpretation.” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 108:80-92.
- 1993c. "þorr's River Crossing", Saga-Book 23:469-487.
- 1993d. "The Host of Dvalinn: Thoughts on Some Dwarf-Names in Old Icelandic.” Collegium Medievale 6:81-96.
- 1994. "The Magician and His Craft." Collegium Medievale 7:5-31.
- 1996a. The King, the Champion and the Sorcerer: A Study in Germanic Myth. Wien: Fassbaender. ISBN 3900538573.
- 1996b. "Kingship and the Giants", Arkiv för nordisk filologi 111:73–88.
- 1996c. "The Power of Speech: Eddic Poems and their Frames", Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 46:105-117.
- 1997a. The Faces of the Goddess. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195089677.
- 1997b. "The Germanic Thunderweapon", Saga-Book 24:329-350.
- 1998a. "The Sky God of the Indo-Europeans", Indogermanische Forschungen 103:28-39.
- 1998b. "The Great Goddess of the North", Arkiv för nordisk filologi 113:29-57.
- 1998c. "Oðinnn's Vision", Maal og Minne 11-19.