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.
[5] Motz's early essay on the Eddic poem, Svipdagsmál[6] summarizes previous theories concerning the origin of the work and advanced a novel interpretation of the hero Svipdag's journey to Menglöð's hall.
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,"[9] 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".
Motz, too, stresses the fact that the Vanir are, like the Æsir, 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.”[10]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 Mediterranean.
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.
This workshop resulted in the publication of a commemorative volume of eleven scholarly works in German and English concerning female entities in Northern mythology.