A birth that will not come on time: the shape holds a child in the womb past its term, and behind the delay it sets an enemy working by spell. Our shelf shows both halves, though not in one witness.

The vast half is Finnish. In the Kalevala (the Finnish epic compiled from oral song 1835–1849), the maiden of the air, Ilmatar (the Ether's daughter), sinks into the sea and drifts as a "water-mother," overburdened and unable to rise: "Seven hundred years she wandered," "Swam in travail, swam unceasing," "Ere her first-born was delivered." The child within is Wainamoinen, who lies "Lingering within his dungeon" "Thirty summers altogether," "Still remaining undelivered", until he breaks the lock himself and is at last "delivered from his mother, / Ilmatar, the Ether’s daughter." Here the long pregnancy is cosmic and unhurried — yet no enemy bewitches it; the delay is only the slowness of a world still being made.

For the enemy the shelf turns Greek. Apollodorus's Library (Bibliotheca) (a Greek mythography of the 1st–2nd century CE) tells how, on the night Hercules was due, "Hera out of jealousy persuaded the" birth-goddesses "to retard Alemena’s delivery" — the Ilithyias (the goddesses of childbirth) — so that a rival, Eurystheus, might be born first, a "seven-month child." James George Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish classicist who Englished this Library and wrote The Golden Bough, adds in a note that such retarding was sympathetic magic: elsewhere the goddess of childbirth sits "with crossed legs and clasped hands", and among the Efik and Ibibio knots are tied "to retard delivery" "by sympathetic magic". A spell, not merely the calendar, holds the door shut.

Only these two witnesses are wired to served text; Thompson's Persian, Chinese, Batak, Tinguian and Madagascar authorities wait unread, and the bewitching enemy survives here on the Greek line alone. Is the long pregnancy the same story as the hexed one, or two shapes the record has filed under a single roof?