Watership Down

In the Sandleford warren,[lower-alpha 2] Fiver, a young runt rabbit who is a seer, receives a frightening vision of his warren's imminent destruction.[20] When he and his brother Hazel fail to convince their chief rabbit of the need to evacuate, they set out on their own, accompanied by nine other rabbits who choose to go with them. The first challenge in the small band's search for a new home comes immediately, as they are forced to elude the Owsla, the warren's military caste, who believe they are trying to spread dissent against the chief.

Once out in the world, the travelling group of rabbits finds itself following the leadership of Hazel, who, until now, has been just another unimportant member of the warren. The group travels far and through dangerous territory. Bigwig and Silver, both former Owsla and the strongest rabbits among them, do well to keep the others protected, along with Hazel's keen observations and good judgment. Along the way, they evade a badger (known in Lapine as lendris), a dog, a car, and a crow; Hazel also manages to stop three rabbits from returning to the Sandleford warren.

They meet a rabbit named Cowslip, who invites them to join his warren. At first, Hazel's group are largely relieved to finally be able to sleep and feed well – except for Fiver, who senses only death there. Bigwig, Blackberry and Fiver's friend Pipkin suspect something suspicious, but they don't think too much of it. When Bigwig is nearly killed in a snare, Fiver, in a crazed lecture, makes the group realise the new warren is managed by a farmer who protects and feeds the rabbits, but also harvests a number of them for their meat and skins. The residents of the new warren are simply using Hazel and the others to increase their own odds of survival. Fiver and the rest of the group work together to rescue Bigwig from the snare, then continue on their journey, taking with them a rabbit from Cowslip's warren called Strawberry, who asks to join them after it is implied that his doe is killed in a snare.

Fiver's visions have promised them a safe place in which to settle, and the group eventually finds Watership Down, which matches Fiver's description of the perfect home exactly. There they are soon reunited with Holly and Bluebell, who were with Bigwig in the Owsla. The two are nursing severe injuries which, they reveal, were inflicted as they escaped the violent human destruction of Sandleford, and then later at Cowslip's warren. Holly also confesses it was he who had tried to stop them leaving that first night rather than working under the chief rabbit's orders, but Fiver's vision coming true has left him a changed rabbit and he is there to join them in whatever way they will have him.

Nuthanger Farm, Hampshire, England, in 2004

Although Watership Down is a peaceful habitat, Hazel realises there are no does, making the future of the warren certain to end with the inevitable deaths of the rabbits present. With the help of their useful new friend, a black-headed gull named Kehaar, they locate a nearby warren called Efrafa, which is overcrowded and has many does. Hazel sends a small embassy, led by Holly, to Efrafa to present their request for does.

Meanwhile, Hazel and Pipkin, the smallest member of the group, scout the nearby Nuthanger Farm, where they find two pairs of hutch rabbits. Despite their uncertainty about living wild, the hutch rabbits are willing to come to Watership. Hazel leads a raid on the farm the next day, during which he rescues both does but only one of the bucks, and at the expense of badly injuring Hazel's hind-leg. When the emissary returns soon after, Hazel and his rabbits learn that Efrafa is a police state led by the despotic General Woundwort. Holly and the other rabbits dispatched there have managed to return with little more than their lives intact.

However, Holly's group has managed to identify an Efrafan doe named Hyzenthlay who wishes to leave the warren, and can recruit other does to join in the escape. Hazel and Bigwig devise a plan to rescue Hyzenthlay's group and bring them to Watership Down; Bigwig is sent to do the mission, with infrequent help from Kehaar, and the group escape using a raft. Again, Bigwig nearly dies in the escape attempt. Once they are at Watership Down, the Efrafan escapees start their new life of freedom.

Shortly thereafter, however, the Owsla of Efrafa, led by Woundwort himself, arrives to attack and colonise the warren at Watership Down. Through Bigwig's bravery and loyalty, and Hazel's ingenuity, the Watership Down rabbits seal the fate of the Efrafan general by unleashing the Nuthanger Farm watchdog. As the Efrafans flee in terror, Woundwort, despite being greatly wounded in his battle with Bigwig, refuses to back down and leaps at the dog. His body is never found, and at least one of his former followers continues to believe in his survival. Hazel is nearly killed by one of the farmhouse cats, but he is saved by the farm girl Lucy, the former owner of the escaped hutch rabbits.

The story's epilogue tells the reader of how Hazel, dozing in his burrow "one chilly, blustery morning in March" some years later, is visited by El-ahrairah, the spiritual overseer of all rabbits, and hero of the traditional rabbit stories heard sporadically over the course of the book. He invites Hazel to join his own Owsla, reassuring him of his warren's success and its future. Leaving his friends and no-longer-needed physical body behind, Hazel departs Watership Down with the spirit guide.

The book explores the themes of exile, survival, heroism, leadership, political responsibility, and the "making of a hero and a community".[25] 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."[24]

The concept of the hero has invited comparisons between Watership Down's characters and those in Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid.[23] 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.[26] Kenneth Kitchell declared, "Hazel stands in the tradition of Odysseus, Aeneas, and others".[27] 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 Odysseus, 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."[5]

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 said the story was "nothing like that at all". He said 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."[28] Instead, he explained, the "let-in" religious stories of El-ahrairah were meant more as legendary tales, similar to a rabbit Robin Hood, and these stories were interspersed throughout the book as humorous interjections to the often "grim" tales of the "real story".[29]

Adams won the 1972 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.[36] He also won the annual Guardian Children's Fiction Prize,[37] a similar award that authors may not win twice.[38][lower-alpha 3] In 1977 California schoolchildren selected it for the inaugural California Young Reader Medal in the Young Adult category, which annually honours one book from the last four years.[39] In The Big Read, a 2003 survey of the British public, it was voted the forty-second greatest book of all time.[40]

The 1993 Puffin Modern Classics edition of the novel contains an afterword by Nicholas Tucker, who wrote that stories such as Watership Down "now fit rather uneasily into the modern world of consideration of both sexes". He contrasted Hazel's sensitivity to Fiver with the "far more mechanical" attitude of the bucks towards the does portrayed as "little more than passive baby-factories".[41]

In the New York Times Book Review essay "Male Chauvinist Rabbits", Selma G. Lanes alleges that the does are only "instruments of reproduction" to prevent the achievement of reaching Watership Down from "becoming a hollow victory".[42] Lanes argued that this view of female rabbits came from Adams rather than his source text, Ronald Lockley's The Private Life of the Rabbit in which the rabbit world is matriarchal, and new warrens are initiated by dissatisfied young females.[43]

In similar vein, literary critic Jane Resh Thomas said Watership Down "draws upon ... an anti-feminist social tradition which, removed from the usual human context and imposed upon rabbits, is eerie in its clarity". Thomas also called it a "splendid story" in which "anti-feminist bias ... damages the novel in only a minor way".[44]

Adams' 1996 sequel, Tales from Watership Down includes stories where the female rabbits play a more prominent role in the Watership Down warren. It has been suggested this might have been an attempt to modernise the story, to make it more in tune with the political sensibilities of the 1990s when it was published.[45]

On 27 May 2020, the high court in London ruled that Martin Rosen, the director of the 1978 film adaptation, had wrongly claimed that he owned all rights to the book, as well as terminating his contract for rights to the film. Rosen had entered into adaptation contracts worth more than $500,000 (£400,000), including licenses for an audiobook adaptation and the 2018 television adaptation.

In his ruling, Judge Richard Hacon ordered Rosen to pay over $100,000 in damages for copyright infringement, unauthorised license deals, and denying royalty payments to the Adams estate. Rosen was also directed to provide a record of all license agreements involving Watership Down, and pay court costs and the Adams estate's legal fees totalling £28,000.[46]

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,[47] despite Richard Adams "hat[ing]" it.[48]

Although the essentials of the plot remained relatively unchanged, the film omitted 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 includes a band of only eight. Rosen's adaptation was praised for "cutting through Adams' book ... to get to the beating heart".[49]

The film has also seen some positive critical attention. In 1979 the film received a nomination for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.[50] Additionally, British television station Channel 4's 2006 documentary 100 Greatest Cartoons named it the 86th greatest cartoon of all time.[51]

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.[52] But only the first two series were aired in the UK, while all three series were aired in Canada. It was produced by Martin Rosen and starred several well-known British actors, including Stephen Fry, Rik Mayall, Dawn French, John Hurt, and Richard Briers, running for a total of 39 episodes over three seasons. Although the story was broadly based on the novel and most characters and events retained, some of the story lines and characters (especially in later episodes) were entirely new. In 2003, the second season was nominated for a Gemini Award for Best Original Music Score for a Dramatic Series.[53]

In July 2014, it was announced that the BBC would be airing a new animated series based on the book[54] and in April 2016 that the series would be a co-production between the BBC and Netflix, consisting of four one-hour episodes,[55] with a budget of £20 million. The four episode miniseries premiered on the BBC and Netflix on 23 December 2018, with the voices of James McAvoy as Hazel, John Boyega as Bigwig, and Ben Kingsley as General Woundwort.[56] It received generally positive reviews, with praise for the performances of its voice cast, but receiving criticism for its tone and the quality of the computer animation.[57][58][59]

In 2006, Watership Down was again adapted for the stage, this time by Rona Munro. It ran at the Lyric Hammersmith in London. Directed by Melly Still, the cast included Matthew Burgess, Joseph Traynor, and Richard Simons. 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."[60] 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."[61]

In 2011, Watership Down was adapted for the Lifeline Theatre in Chicago by John Hildreth. This production was directed by Katie McLean Hainsworth and the cast included Scott T. Barsotti, Chris Daley, Paul S. Holmquist, and Mandy Walsh.[62]

Watership Down inspired the creation of Bunnies & Burrows, a role-playing game in which the main characters are talking rabbits, published in 1976 by Fantasy Games Unlimited.[63] 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.

In 2002, a two-part, two-hour dramatisation of Watership Down by Neville Teller was broadcast by BBC Radio 4.[64][65][66]

In November 2016, a new two-part two-hour dramatisation, written by Brian Sibley, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4.[67]

In the 1970s, the book was released by Argo Records read by Roy Dotrice, with musical background—music by George Butterworth performed by Academy of St Martin in the Fields under the direction of Neville Marriner.[68][69]

In 1984, Watership Down was adapted into a four-cassette audiobook by John Maher in association with the Australian Broadcasting Company's Renaissance Players. Produced by John Hannaford and narrated by Kerry Francis, the audiobook was distributed by The Mind's Eye.[70]

In 1990, a 16-hour, 11-cassette recording read by John MacDonald was published by Books on Tape, Inc. of Santa Ana, CA.[71]

Andrew Sachs recorded a five and a half-hour abridged version of the story for Puffin Audiobooks.[72]

In 2010, Audible.com released an unabridged digital download of the book, narrated by the multiple award-winning Ralph Cosham.[73]

In 2019, Blackstone Audio Inc. released an unabridged version of Watership Down with a foreword by the author, Richard Adams. Peter Capaldi narrated the 17-hour, 31-minute book.[74]