| Watership Down | |
|---|---|
First edition cover |
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| Author(s) | Richard Adams |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Fantasy novel |
| Publisher | Rex Collings |
| Publication date | November 1972 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback and paperback) |
| Pages | 413 (First edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-901720-31-3 (First edition, hardback) |
| OCLC Number | 36359929 |
| Dewey Decimal | 823/.9/14 |
| LC Classification | PZ10.3.A197 Wat PR6051.D345 |
| Followed by | Tales from Watership Down |
Watership Down is a classic heroic fantasy novel, written by English author Richard Adams, about a small group of rabbits. Although the animals in the story live in their natural environment, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language (Lapine), proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel recounts the rabbits' odyssey as they escape the destruction of their warren to seek a place in which to establish a new home, encountering perils and temptations along the way.
The novel takes its name from the rabbits' destination, Watership Down, a hill in the north of Hampshire, England, near the area where Adams grew up. The story is based on a collection of tales that Adams told to his young children to pass the time on trips to the countryside.
Published in 1972, Watership Down was Richard Adams' first novel, and is by far his most successful to date. Although it was initially rejected by 13 publishers before eventually being accepted by Rex Collings Ltd, Watership Down has never been out of print, and was the recipient of several prestigious awards. Adapted into an acclaimed classic film and a television series, it is Penguin Books' best-selling novel of all time.[1][2] In 1996, Adams published Tales from Watership Down, a follow-up collection of 19 short stories about El-ahrairah and the rabbits of the Watership Down warren.[3][4]
Contents |
Watership Down began as a story Richard Adams told to his two daughters, Juliet and Rosamond, on a long car journey; in an interview, Adams said he "began telling the story of the rabbits ... improvised off the top of my head, as we were driving along."[2][5] He based the struggles of the animals in the story on the struggles he and his friends encountered during the Battle of Oosterbeek, Arnhem, the Netherlands in 1944.[1] His daughters insisted he write it down—"they were very, very persistent"—and though he initially delayed, he eventually began writing in the evenings, completing it 18 months later.[5] The book is dedicated to his daughters.[6]
| "To Juliet and Rosamund, remembering the road to Stratford-on-Avon" |
| —Dedication, Watership Down |
However, Adams had difficulty finding a publisher; his novel was rejected 13 times in all, until it was finally accepted by Rex Collings, a small publishing house.[2] The publisher had little capital and could not pay Adams an advance; but "he got a review copy onto every desk in London that mattered."[5]
Adams's descriptions of wild rabbit behaviour were based upon The Private Life of the Rabbit (1964), by British naturalist Ronald Lockley.[7][8] The two later became friends and went on an expedition to the Antarctic, resulting in a joint writing venture, Voyage Through the Antarctic, published in 1982.[7]
In the Sandleford warren, Fiver, a young runt rabbit who is a seer, receives a frightening vision of his warren's imminent destruction. When he and his brother Hazel fail to convince their chief rabbit of the need to evacuate, they set out on their own with a small band of rabbits to search for a new home, barely eluding the Owsla, the warren's military caste.
The travelling group of rabbits find themselves following the leadership of Hazel, previously an unimportant member of the warren. They travel through dangerous territory, with Bigwig and Silver, both former Owsla, as the only significantly strong rabbits among them.
Fiver's visions promise a safe place in which to settle, and the group eventually finds Watership Down, an ideal location to set up their new warren. They are soon reunited with Holly and Bluebell, also from the Sandleford Warren, who reveal that Fiver's vision was true and the entire warren was destroyed by humans.
Although Watership Down is a peaceful habitat, Hazel realises there are no does (female rabbits), thus making the future of their new home uncertain. With the help of a seagull named Kehaar, they locate a nearby warren, Efrafa, which is overcrowded and has many does. Hazel sends a small emissary to Efrafa to present their request for does. While waiting for the group to return, Hazel and Pipkin successfully raid the nearby Nuthanger Farm to rescue a group of hutch rabbits there, returning with two does. When the emissary returns, Hazel and his rabbits learn Efrafa is a police state led by the despotic General Woundwort; Hazel's rabbits barely return alive. However, the group does manage to identify an Efrafan doe named Hyzenthlay who wants to leave the warren and can recruit other does to join. Hazel and Bigwig devise a plan to rescue the group of rabbits from Efrafa to join them on Watership Down. The Efrafan escapees start their new life on Watership Down, but soon Woundwort's army arrives to attack the Watership Down warren. Through Bigwig's bravery and loyalty and Hazel's ingenuity, the Watership Down rabbits defeat Woundwort.
The story's epilogue tells the reader of how Hazel, dozing in his burrow one "chilly, blustery morning in March" many years later, is visited by the rabbit folk hero El-ahrairah, who invites Hazel to join his Owsla. Leaving his friends and no-longer-needed body behind, Hazel departs Watership Down with El-ahrairah, "running easily down through the wood, where the first primroses were beginning to bloom."[6]
Watership Down has been described as an allegory, with the labours of Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, and Silver "mirror[ing] the timeless struggles between tyranny and freedom, reason and blind emotion, and the individual and the corporate state."[10] Adams draws on classical heroic and quest themes from Homer and Virgil, creating a story with epic motifs.[11]
It has been suggested that Watership Down contains symbolism of several religions, or that the stories of El-ahrairah were meant to mimic some elements of real-world religion. When asked in a 2007 BBC Radio interview about the religious symbolism in the novel, Adams stated that the story was "nothing like that at all." Adams said that the rabbits in Watership Down did not worship, however, "they believed passionately in El-ahrairah". Adams explained that he meant the book to be, "only a made-up story... in no sense an allegory or parable or any kind of political myth. I simply wrote down a story I told to my little girls". Instead, he explained, the "let-in" religious stories of El-ahrairah were meant more as legendary tales, similar to a rabbit Robin Hood, and that these stories were interspersed throughout the book as humorous interjections to the often "grim" tales of the "real story".[12]
The book explores the themes of exile, survival, heroism, political responsibility, and the "making of a hero and a community".[13] Joan Bridgman's analysis of Adams's works in The Contemporary Review identifies the community and hero motifs: "[T]he hero's journey into a realm of terrors to bring back some boon to save himself and his people" is a powerful element in Adams's tale. This theme derives from the author's exposure to the works of mythologist Joseph Campbell, especially his study of comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), and in particular, Campbell's "monomyth" theory, also based on Carl Jung's view of the unconscious mind, that "all the stories in the world are really one story.".[11]
The concept of the hero has invited comparisons between Watership Down's characters and those in Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid.[10] Hazel's courage, Bigwig's strength, Blackberry's ingenuity and craftiness, and Dandelion's and Bluebell's poetry and storytelling all have parallels in the epic poem Odyssey.[14] Kenneth Kitchell declared, "Hazel stands in the tradition of Odysseus, Aeneas, and others".[15] Tolkien scholar John Rateliff calls Adams's novel an Aeneid "what-if" book: what if the seer Cassandra (Fiver) had been believed and she and a company had fled Troy (Sandleford Warren) before its destruction? What if Hazel and his companions, like Aeneas, encounter a seductive home at Cowslip's Warren (Land of the Lotus Eaters)? Rateliff goes on to compare the rabbits' battle with Woundwort's Efrafans to Aeneas's fight with Turnus's Latins. "By basing his story on one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Adams taps into a very old myth: the flight from disaster, the heroic refugee in search of a new home, a story that was already over a thousand years old when Virgil told it in 19 BC."[1]
The Economist heralded the book's publication, saying "If there is no place for Watership Down in children’s bookshops, then children’s literature is dead."[16] Peter Prescott, senior book reviewer at Newsweek, gave the novel a glowing review: "Adams handles his suspenseful narrative more dextrously than most authors who claim to write adventure novels, but his true achievement lies in the consistent, comprehensible and altogether enchanting civilisation that he has created."[13] Kathleen J. Rothen and Beverly Langston identified the work as one that "subtly speaks to a child", with "engaging characters and fast-paced action [that] make it readable."[14] This echoed Nicholas Tucker's praise for the story's suspense in the New Statesman: "Adams... has bravely and successfully resurrected the big picaresque adventure story, with moments of such tension that the helplessly involved reader finds himself checking whether things are going to work out all right on the next page before daring to finish the preceding one."[17]
The "enchanting" world Prescott admired was not as well received upon its 1974 American publication. Although again the object of general approval, reception in the United States was more mixed, unlike the predominantly positive reviews of 1972. D. Keith Mano, a science fiction writer and conservative social commentator writing in the National Review, declared that the novel was "pleasant enough, but it has about the same intellectual firepower as Dumbo." He pilloried it further: "Watership Down is an adventure story, no more than that: rather a swashbuckling crude one to boot. There are virtuous rabbits and bad rabbits: if that’s allegory, Bonanza is an allegory."[18]
Despite the criticism, Watership Down was a hit with the reading public. The novel found a spot on the Publishers Weekly best-seller list in March 1974; it attained the number one ranking on 15 April 1974, and remained there for another three months. The book did not drop off the list until February 1975.
John Rowe Townsend notes that the book quickly achieved such a high popularity despite the fact that it, "came out at a high price and in an unattractive jacket from a publisher who had hardly been heard of".[19] Fred Inglis, in his book The Promise of Happiness: Value and meaning in children's fiction, praises the author’s use of prose to express the strangeness of ordinary human inventions from the rabbits' perspective.[20]
Watership Down's universal motifs of liberation and self-determination have led to the tendency of minority groups to read their own narrative into the novel, despite the author's assurance that it "was never intended to become some sort of allegory or parable." Rachel Kadish, reflecting on her own superimposition of the founding of Israel onto Watership Down, has remarked "Turns out plenty of other people have seen their histories in that book...some people see it as an allegory for struggles against the Cold War, fascism, extremism...a protest against materialism, against the corporate state. Watership Down can be Ireland after the famine, Rwanda after the massacres." Kadish has praised both the fantasy genre and Watership Down for its "motifs [that] hit home in every culture...all passersby are welcome to bring their own subplots and plug into the archetype." [21]
Watership Down won the Carnegie Medal in 1972,[22] the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 1973,[23] and the California Young Reader Medal in 1977.[24] In The Big Read, a 2003 survey of the British public, it was voted the forty-second greatest book of all time.[25]
In 1978 Martin Rosen wrote and directed an animated film adaptation of Watership Down. The voice cast included John Hurt, Richard Briers, Harry Andrews, Simon Cadell, Nigel Hawthorne, and Roy Kinnear. The film featured the song "Bright Eyes", sung by Art Garfunkel. Released as a single, the song became a UK number one hit.[26]
Although the essentials of the plot remained relatively unchanged, the film omits several side plots. Though the Watership Down warren eventually grew to seventeen rabbits, with the additions of Strawberry, Holly, Bluebell, and three hutch rabbits liberated from the farm, the movie only includes a band of eight. Rosen's adaptation was praised for "cutting through Adams' book ... to get to the beating heart".[27]
The film has also seen some positive critical attention. In 1979 the film received a nomination for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.[28] Additionally, British television station Channel 4's 2006 documentary 100 Greatest Cartoons named it the 86th greatest cartoon of all time.[29]
A screenplay is currently in development for a re-adaptation of the book.
From 1999 to 2001, the book was also adapted as an animated television series, broadcast on CITV in the UK and on YTV in Canada.[30] It starred several well-known British actors, including Stephen Fry, Rik Mayall, Dawn French, John Hurt, and Richard Briers, and ran for a total of 39 episodes over three seasons. Although the story was broadly based on that of the novel, with most characters and many incidents retained, in later episodes especially some story lines and characters were entirely new. In 2003, the second season was nominated for a Gemini Award for Best Original Music Score for a Dramatic Series.[31]
In 2006, Watership Down was adapted into a theatrical production by Rona Munro for the Lyric Hammersmith in London. Directed by Melly Still, the cast included Matthew Burgess, Joseph Traynor, and Richard Simons, and ran from November 2006 through January 2007.[32] The tone of the production was inspired by the tension of war: in an interview with The Guardian, Still commented, "The closest humans come to feeling like rabbits is under war conditions ... We've tried to capture that anxiety."[33] A reviewer at The Times called the play "an exciting, often brutal tale of survival" and said that "even when it’s a muddle, it’s a glorious one."[34]
Watership Down inspired the creation of Bunnies & Burrows, a role-playing game centred around talking rabbits, published in 1976 by Fantasy Games Unlimited.[35] It introduced several innovations to role-playing game design, being the first game to allow players to have non-humanoid roles, as well as the first with detailed martial arts and skill systems. Fantasy Games Unlimited published a second edition of the game in 1982, and the game was modified and republished by Steve Jackson Games as an official GURPS supplement in 1992.
American folk rock trio America performed a song titled "Watership Down", released by Warner Bros. Records in April 1976 on their Hideaway album. Composed by singer/songwriter Gerry Beckley, the song's lyrics refer obliquely to the story elements, including the phrase "you might hear them in the distance, if your ear's to the ground." Although the song did not chart, it did receive airplay on FM album rock stations during the year.
Swedish progressive rock musician Bo Hansson recorded a suite named "Rabbit Music" which was based on the book, as part of his 1975 album Attic Thoughts. Two years later, Hansson released an entire album devoted to the novel, titled Music Inspired by Watership Down.
The British electro group Ladytron shot a music video for their single "Ghosts", off their 2008 album Velocifero, which featured many references to Watership Down.
American art-rock band ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead has one song on their self-titled album, released in 1998, called "Prince With A Thousand Enemies".
American hip-hop group Common Market recorded a song called "Watership Down" on their 2008 EP Black Patch War.
American punk band AFI used imagery from the movie on the cover of their Decemberunderground album.
The Paul McCartney and Wings album Band On The Run (1973) has the song "Band On The Run" referencing this work in the line "And the bell was ringing in the village square for the rabbits on the run".
New Jersey based hardcore punk band Bigwig takes their name from the character in the novel. The cover art of their first album, Unmerry Melodies, features a rabbit resembling the character of Bigwig, and the song "Best of Me" features a sample from the film Watership Down.[36]
American singer-songwriter Vanessa Carlton's 2011 album Rabbits on the Run was inspired by Watership Down and A Brief History of Time.[37]
American music producer Sonny Moore (aka Skrillex) named his music label after OWSLA. (2011)
In an episode of the British comedy show The Goodies, entitled Animals, nature presenters from the BBC are forced to escape in rabbit suits from the fury of animals now granted equal rights with humans. It features the music and animation in the style of the movies.
In the American TV show Robot Chicken, a parody of the book is done with the Fraggles, the main characters of the show Fraggle Rock, in place of the rabbits.
Watership Down has been referenced in other media.
| Awards | ||
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| Preceded by Josh |
Carnegie Medal recipient 1972 |
Succeeded by The Ghost of Thomas Kempe |
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