Lotte Motz, born Lotte Edlis (August 16, 1922 – December 24, 1997), was an Austrian-American scholar, obtaining a Ph.D. in German and philology, 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 D.Phil. 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.

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," describing Motz's argument as "introduc[ing] an element of speculation into our understanding of Norse myth for which there is no textual or other evidence" while noting 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,