Demons

The Demons are nonhuman beings in the island-origin legend of Albina. Their union with thirty-three exiled princesses produces a race of giants, making them agents in the novel’s imagined prehistory and a source of uncertainty about the origins of Britain.

Role in the Albina Legend

The legend begins with a Greek king whose thirty-three daughters revolt against their husbands. Rather than kill his daughters, the king exiles them in a ship without a rudder, provisioned for six months. Carried to the edge of the known world, they reach a mist-shrouded island with no name. The eldest names it Albina.

The island has no human men; its only inhabitants are Demons. The daughters join with them, and their children are giants. The legend thus assigns the Demons a foundational role: they are not merely inhabitants of the island but participants in the emergence of its first people.

Generations and Origins

The giants born of the Demons and the princesses continue the line, producing more of their kind. The origin story therefore presents Albina’s earliest ancestry as a sequence of human and nonhuman unions, rather than a straightforward human genealogy. The Demons’ presence establishes the boundary between human and monstrous as unstable at the very point where the island’s population begins.

The account is a legend embedded in the book’s broader engagement with Britain’s mythic past. Its significance lies in the way it makes origins simultaneously genealogical and uncanny: the island receives its name from a woman, while its first inhabitants descend from the Demons and the exiled daughters. The narrative supplies no further individual identities or later actions for the Demons beyond their role in this founding story.