Otter

The otter holds a pivotal place in Norse myth through the tale of the otter's ransom. Otr, a son of the magician Hreidmar, took the shape of an otter to fish, and was killed by Loki, who took him for a real animal. To atone, the gods were forced to fill and cover the otter's flayed skin with gold, and Loki seized the treasure of the dwarf Andvari to do it, gold that carried Andvari's curse, and with it the ring that would bring ruin on all who held it, setting in motion the whole tragic cycle of the Volsungs and the Nibelungs. The otter's death is the small beginning of a vast doom.

The sea otter offers a genuine modern conservation story distinct from either myth above: hunted for its exceptionally dense fur, the warmest of any mammal, to the edge of extinction by the early twentieth century, the species has been the subject of sustained protection and reintroduction efforts since, and its recovery matters ecologically beyond the animal itself, since sea otters are a keystone species whose predation on sea urchins keeps kelp forests from being stripped bare, so the health of an entire coastal ecosystem tracks the otter population. A species distinction underlies the two otter stories told in this pair of articles: Otr of the Norse myth would have been a Eurasian otter, Lutra lutra, a freshwater animal of European rivers, entirely different from the sea otter, Enhydra lutris, discussed below, a North Pacific marine species unknown to the Norse world that produced the tale of Andvari's cursed gold.

In Zoroastrian tradition the otter is a peculiarly sacred animal, the water-dog, a good creature of the pure element of water, and the Vendidad prescribes an enormous and famous penance for anyone who kills one, so highly was its life valued. Elsewhere the otter's evident playfulness, its sliding, its games, its sociability, gave it a gentler symbolism of joy, curiosity and the pleasure of the water, and coastal peoples wove it into their stories as a creature at home between land and stream. Bringer of a great curse in the North and a holy creature of water in the East, the otter carries meanings that range from tragic doom to sacred purity to simple play.

The otter appears occasionally as a heraldic charge in British coats of arms, generally granted to families or places whose name puns on the animal, such as Otterburn, and its heraldic meaning is generally given simply as vigilance or resourcefulness in the water, a comparatively minor and secular tradition beside the weight of doom and sanctity carried by the Norse and Zoroastrian otters recorded above. Otters remain a genuinely mixed conservation picture worldwide: of the thirteen living otter species, several, the sea otter among them, have recovered substantially under legal protection, while others, including some Asian small-clawed and smooth-coated populations, remain threatened by habitat loss and pollution, a modern layer of concern quite apart from the Vendidad's ancient penance for killing one.