A hero wrestles for a bride and finds his opponent will not hold still. In Apollodorus's Library — a Greek mythography compiled in the 1st or 2nd century CE — Hercules comes to Calydon to woo Deianira and "wrestled for her hand with Achelous", the river-god, "who assumed the likeness of a bull". The grip closes, the shape slides away, and the match is decided by mutilation rather than pin: "Hercules broke off one of his horns." The river-god's whole armory of forms survives only in the editor's note, where Sir James Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish classicist whose translation carries this text, records after Ovid that the god "turned himself first into a serpent and then into a bull" — the true signature of the motif, a fighter who answers each hold with a new body.

The Kalevala (Finnish oral song, compiled 1835–1849) keeps the shape in a lighter, aerial key. Fleeing the war-hosts of Northland, young Lemminkainen escapes not by strength but by shedding his skin: "Changing both his form and features" he "Quick became a mighty eagle" and soars, until "the moonlight burned his temples" and a gray-hawk overtakes him mid-flight to ask, "Art thou thinking of our combat / With the hero-heads of Northland?" Even in the sky the duel is a duel of shapes.

Far to the east the same contest turns cosmic. In Myths & Legends of China, E. T. C. Werner's 1922 compilation, the rebel monkey Sun boasts to the Buddha, "I can change myself into seventy-two different forms"; earlier, cornered by the armies of Heaven, "Sun changed his form" and slipped clean out of the net spread across the sky. The Greek and Finnish and Chinese witnesses are all wired to served text; the Egyptian Horus-and-Seth and the many Indian authorities Frazer's apparatus points to wait unread. Why does the shape-changer, in every telling, lose in the end — the horn broken, the eagle scorched, the monkey pinned beneath a mountain?