To win the woman, first win the work: the shape here sets a bride behind a labor and hands her to whoever can accomplish it. Two witnesses on our shelf carry the pattern cleanly, one from the North and one from the Aegean.

In the Kalevala (the Finnish epic compiled from oral song 1835–1849), the ancient minstrel Wainamoinen is borne from the sea to a cheerless coast and found weeping in Pohyola (the grim Northland), whose toothless hostess Louhi will ferry him home only for a price. Not gold — she waves that away — but a made thing: "Canst thou forge for me the Sampo," she asks, the Sampo being the wondrous artifact she wants hammered "From a single grain of barley" and "the finest wool of lambkins." And the maiden goes with it: "I will give thee too my daughter". Wainamoinen cannot forge it, so he pledges another smith — "I will send thee Ilmarinen," "the one that forged the heavens" — and Louhi at once moves the bargain to the absent craftsman: "Him alone I’ll give my daughter," "Promise him my child in marriage," "Who for me will forge the Sampo". The bride is the wage of an impossible commission.

The Greek witness is starker. Apollodorus's Library (Bibliotheca) (a Greek mythography of the 1st–2nd century CE) tells how Admetus "wooed Alcestis, daughter of Pelias", and how her father "had promised to give his daughter to him who should" "yoke a lion and a boar to a car". Admetus cannot, but Apollo yokes the beasts for him; he brings them to Pelias "and so obtained Alcestis." The prize keeps its teeth — forgetting Artemis at the wedding, he "found it full of coiled snakes" in the marriage chamber — yet the frame is bare: perform the yoking, take the bride.

Both witnesses lean on a helper who does the deed the suitor cannot — a rival smith, a god. When the task is truly beyond the wooer, to whom is the bride really promised: the man who asks, or the hands that finish the work?