“The first language of our race”. the ancient inhabitants of Britain in ghost stories

Abstract

The article examines the image of the earliest inhabitants of the British Isles in British Gothic short fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The study analyzes the works by Grant Allen, John Buchan, Edward Frederic Benson, Arthur Machen and other authors, in which Picts, Druids, and other archaic figures become embodiments of a sinister antiquity and a hostile prehistoric past. The article employs historical-literary, comparative, and cultural approaches that make it possible to trace the relationship between the Gothic literary tradition and the intellectual context of the Victorian period. The analysis demonstrates that literary representations of ancient Britons were closely connected with nineteenth-century scientific and pseudo-scientific ideas, including anthropological, racial, ethnographic, and evolutionary theories. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between Gothic genre conventions and contemporary archaeological and historical concepts, as well as to the influence of Victorian anthropology on the formation of the image of the archaic “Other”. The paper argues that the ancient inhabitants of Britain function in these texts not only as sources of supernatural horror, but also as reflections of cultural anxieties concerning degeneration, atavism, primitivism, and the figure of the “savage.” The article concludes that this motif gradually lost its significance as scholarly perceptions of the Picts and other early peoples of Britain changed in the twentieth century.