My elf wife and I were happy, but every now and then she would disappear. I asked her one day, “What can I do to keep you from vanishing into the other world?”

“Dear husband, I am bound to go, even against my will, and there is only one way to stop me. Drive a nail through the threshold, and then I can never pass in or out,” she said.

And so I did.

The Elf Maiden’s Husband, The Elf Maiden, Brown Fairy Book. Illustration by Edward Burne-Jones.