Introduction
Otr was a son of Hreidmar with the unusual habit of spending much of his time in the shape of an otter, fishing in a nearby waterfall.
Family
An Accidental Death
As the gods Odin, Loki, and Hoenir traveled through the region, Loki killed Otr with a stone, mistaking him for an ordinary otter (or, in some readings, simply for sport), and skinned him. When the travelers sought lodging at Hreidmar's house and displayed the pelt, Hreidmar recognized his son's skin and, with his surviving sons Fafnir and Regin, held the gods captive until they paid a ransom of gold sufficient to cover the skin entirely — gold that came from Andvari's cursed hoard.
The Volsunga Saga and the Poetic Edda preserve the Norse-Icelandic form of this legend; the German Nibelungenlied recounts substantially the same events under different names (Sigurd as Siegfried, Brynhild as Brünnhilde, Atli as Etzel/Attila), reflecting a shared Germanic legendary tradition rather than a single fixed text.