'Be Cunning and Full of Tricks'

Epic heroes, myth and rabbit folklore in Richard Adams' Watership Down

Jun 01, 2024

If I were to mention ‘Watership Down’, stills of animated rabbits and cartoon gore might spring to mind, the unforgettable images of John Hurt’s 1978 film adaptation which have terrified several generations of children and adults despite its PG rating. Younger fans may recall the 2018 adaptation and slightly less young, the 1999 tv series which took considerable liberties with the plot. Of course, these adaptations orbit the novel by Richard Adams, published in 1972. As many other avid childhood readers may relate to, literary gifts from older guardians and relatives often took the form of childhood classics or anything with small animals on the cover – often, these two qualities coincide. I received similar treatment and by the time I was ten had made my through Black Beauty, The Animals of Farthing Wood, Watership Down and numerous other, more forgettable, tales dozens of times over. While I reread them all, nothing quite took my fancy the way Adams’ narrative of rabbit resilience did. It was only with later re-reads and a bit more literary knowledge under my belt that I began to discern a wealth of influence within its pages, particularly the shadows, looming large, of similar heroes, myths, folklores.

For those who may not be so familiar with the work, I shall briefly recount the events of Watership Down. Fiver, a diminutive young rabbit with strangely prophetic dreams is made hysterical by the conviction that a great danger looms over his rabbit warren – the reader learns that the entire field, an ‘ideally situated estate’ is soon to be developed into ‘high class modern residences’ and the rabbit community will be razed to the ground in what (to their eyes) is an ecological disaster. Fiver’s older brother, Hazel, believing his adamant warnings, takes his concerns to the head of their warren who dismisses Fiver’s premonitions. Lacking the status or clout to lead a large-scale exodus, Hazel and Fiver depart from the warren in the night, accompanied only by a motley crew of misfits and acquaintances who have been swayed by the nebulous prospect of a new community elsewhere. What follows is an intrepid journey through a wilderness fraught with enemies in the form of friends, and friends in unlikely places. It is a journey mired in danger; conflict and violence and troubles do not end when the rabbits find potential ground for their new home after several false starts. Interwoven with the novel’s plot are fascinating stories, mostly told amongst the rabbits themselves, of their own folklore and myth. These centre on the figure of El-ahrairah, a trickster prince seen as the rabbit nonpareil, an embodiment of what it means to be a rabbit and the origin of all rabbit existence. His escapades are not just insights to Adams’ rabbit culture but sources of comfort to the often not-so-merry band of travellers on their odyssey.

Upon rereading the novel for the umpteenth time, this realisation, when it came, was so immediate and assured I almost laughed that it had not come sooner. The novel was The Aeneid with rabbits. Virgil’s Latin epic, as the name indicates, is the story of Aeneas, a Trojan prince who flees with a small band of Trojans following the fall of Troy. The poem follows Aeneas’s travels as he eventually reaches Italy, stopping briefly in the false haven of Dido’s Carthage. Aeneas and his followers found a city after they defeat the Latins, whose name they adopt and eventually become subsumed under, thus turning the tale of Aeneas into a great foundational myth and national epic tying Rome to the legendary Troy. The Aeneid ends pointing towards Brutus, Romulus, Remus: the predestined figures descended from a people forced in to flight like the biblical Exodus. At the close of Watership Down the heroes are rewarded by the narrative with a rabbit Utopia where fertility and fecundity signify security and hope for the future.

A whole host of other classical and foundational texts in the Western canon (and beyond) are implicated by Adams’ tale, not least the aforementioned Odyssey. The fertility of the new warren is the product of the rabbits’ attempts to find a company of does to ensure future progeny mirrors another episode from classical sources: Livy’s account of the Sabine women. The tyrannical Efrafan leader, General Woundwort, is reminiscent of innumerable dictators both on and off the page. Although Adams was largely reticent on attributing an underlying symbolism to his story, describing any perceived allegory as ‘frightful tripe’, his classical influences are made clear almost immediately. The intrusion of humans into the rabbits’ Arcadia is revealed to the reader, the only person other than Fiver who feels the sense of foreboding. The epigraph of the first chapter is taken from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, an exchange between Cassandra and the chorus:

CHORUS: Why do you cry out thus, unless at some vision of horror?
CASSANDRA: The house reeks of death and dripping blood.
CHORUS: How so? ‘Tis but the odour of the altar sacrifice.
CASSANDRA: The stench is like a breath from the tomb.

Fiver is the warren’s own Cassandra, cursed by the disbelief of others, although he has a small but loyal retinue of defenders. He similarly foresees the future bloodshed – ‘The field! It’s covered with blood’ (5) – and although unable to read the sign erected announcing the construction of new homes, he wisely reads the writing on the wall for what it is: a harbinger of doom. The world of the rabbits works on the same consciousness as the world of the Greeks where dreams, visions, signs all have meaning. Joan Bridgman argues that the epigraph plunges the reader ‘not only into heroic epic but also into a world where visions, dreams, prophecies, and myths are accepted parts of life’ (7). The world of myth cannot be confined to the tales that the rabbits tell each other about El-ahrairah or their ‘God’, Frith; myth exists as a ‘continuous layer of meaning throughout the text’.

Most of the major plot developments in the novel are similarly heralded by dreams and prophecies. Fiver acts to interpret these revelations, leading the rabbits across rivers and through strange lands. It is the combination of Fiver’s intuition and the rabbits knowledge of mythological tales that move the plot forward. El-ahrairah is often the source of their inspiration and a subtle hand in the fabric of the plot, a hint at the mystical forces guiding their plucky endeavours. The reader learns that El-ahrairah is an archetypal figure for Rabbitkind and his prominence in the rabbit cultural memory is the means by which a self-image is both constructed and maintained. His survival against all odds, the ‘Prince with a Thousand Enemies’, is the mythos which guides rabbit existence. They as a species will endure despite their almost overwhelming vulnerability, the immortality of their kind the boundless persistence of El-ahrairah. Pipkin, the smallest and most feeble of the bunch, is pulled out of his weariness through remembrance of ‘the great indestructability of the rabbits’, ‘each one of them saw himself as El-ahrairah, who could be impudent to Frith and get away with it’ (37).

El-ahrairah is a trickster hero, beloved for his defiance, his ingenuity and his resistance to larger forces. As Bridgman says, he is comparable to Brer Rabbit and Reynard the Fox, ‘sly, wily heroes, who outwit enemies by trickery, important universal figures of rebellion who embody the survival powers of the weak against the strong’ (13). Like Hermes or Robin Hood, it is beyond belief that there should ever be a scrape that the trickster might not weasel out of eventually, no obstacle they might not overcome. Of course, El-ahrairah’s leading of his people, his proximity to the divine and his endurance of prosecution configure him as a saviour in the Christian fashion as well.

‘The Story of the Blessing of El-ahrairah’ (a slightly ironic name as we shall soon discover) provides some insight to what is essentially, the rabbits’ own creation myth. Frith, a stand-in for God, is upset by El-ahrairah’s unwillingness to control the rabbit population and is driven to bless the other animals with both the skills and the desire to eat and hunt El-ahrairah and his children. Mirroring Genesis and the serpent’s trickery to Eve, the rabbits plunge into their own post-lapsarian world although they are granted a parting mercy from Frith who intones: ‘be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed’. In chapter five Adams comments, ‘Odysseus himself might have borrowed a trick or two from the rabbit hero’.

Conveniently, much like other religions and faiths, the tales of El-ahrairah act as guidance to the mysteries of life, death and existence. As John Pennington points out, ‘these stories as a whole create the myth of the beginning (cosmology), myths of everyday survival, and the myth of death and escape (eschatology)’ (41). At the close of the novel Hazel hears a story about El-ahrairah and his defeat of a rabbit warren under an evil spell, a story he seems to know but can’t quite remember where from. It is the story of his own journey which has been integrated into myth. He passes away:

He had been dreaming in a confused way – something about rain and elder bloom – when he awoke to realize that there was a rabbit lying quietly beside him – no doubt some buck who had come to ask his advice. (474)

Hazel realises that he has died and follows the rabbit towards whatever is next, leaving his body ‘lying on the edge of the ditch […] try[ing] to get used to the extraordinary feeling that strength and speed were flowing inexhaustibly out of him into their sleek young bodies’ (475). His companion reassures him: ‘you needn’t worry about them. They’ll be all right – and thousands like them. If you come along, I’ll show you what I mean’. Myth is not a creative imagined world for the rabbits, it’s a plane of existence that melds in to their lives, both shaping and shaped through generations.

Hazel seems an unlikely figure for the mythologised hero of epic. He is not even a rabbit par excellence according to their own terms, being rather too small and too level-headed to join the Owsla – a sort of rabbit security force that upholds the peace, by force if necessary. The question asked is not just why Adams has chosen rabbits to re-imagine a modern epic hero, why has he chosen Hazel? Could even the hardiest of rabbits prove a worthy successor to the epic hero? Could an epic hero even exist in the modern day? Kenneth Kitchell argues that Adams intends to transpose meaning from the epic in to the modern world – addressing the ‘ever present need for epic heroes and literature and the seeming impossibility of either’ when ‘a traditional heroic age is no longer possible’ (39). He sees the elevation of Hazel from the average rabbit he is to a level of heroism akin to the semi-divine El-ahrairah as an indication of Adams’ intention to examine the true meaning of heroism and honour. Quoting Adams who states that ‘human beings don’t feel epics any more. Rabbits do - they are down on the ground’, Kitchell concludes that the ‘primitive, awe struck cultures within which a heroic age can occur’ are similar to the lived experience of rabbits (26). Hazel’s very incongruity is what makes his journey so remarkable.

Hazel’s death in stately old age is an unusual end for an epic hero. It recalls the fate of Beowulf who also dies old albeit having had his moment to ride off victorious. Indeed, Hazel rather outdoes Beowulf who leaves behind a kingdom fearful of their vulnerability to hostile tribes without his stalwart protection. Like Odysseus, Hazel leads his followers through his Mediterranean sea (about twenty square miles of English countryside), encountering the luxurious Lotus-Eaters (lettuce-eaters) whose tempting bounty hide dark secrets, Laestrygonians and Polyphemus (badgers, dogs and other predators). Unlike Odysseus, Hazel ensures his people’s survival. When pressed, Hazel joins in the fight to lead his people in battle but he is no Achilles – he takes no pride or pleasure in violence. Most of all, he is like Aeneas: he leads a people with no home to a land where new roots can take hold, he founds a community that will continue after him, and above all, he steps into the mould that El-ahrairah has set for him. He has been cunning and he has played his tricks; his people will never be destroyed.

Once again, we return to ideas of death, destruction and annihilation. Much like the Israelites in Egypt mentioned earlier, status is conferred on the people / rabbits as particularly chosen by God / Frith. Despite the encroachment of urban construction and despite the hostility of enemies (both in and out of the species), the rabbits endure and their habitats endure as well. Perhaps it is the nature of animal narratives that they must be eco-critical before the term eco-criticism was even coined. Think of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and the devastating fate of Ginger, a horse worked so viciously by her owners that she dies and is sent to the glue factory, an intensely traumatic event for any young and fresh-faced horse-girl to read. Hazel’s band of rabbits find and establish a spot of nature for themselves – but reading this fifty years on from its publication, one wonders how far the natural world has been eroded beyond a point which it can be reclaimed. How many rabbit warrens today are removed from the sounds of motorway traffic and urban creep?

The Trojans fled a city razed to the ground by human hands – slowly, we are enacting the same violence and ecological destruction of our own habitats and it is often more vulnerable communities, particularly in the Global South, that feel the effects first. What feels most epic to me about Watership Down apart from the parallels mentioned, are the common themes that have linked stories such as these through centuries and millennia: the plight of refugees fleeing conflict or war, migration and the search for a safe home, disease, oppression, human taint upon the earth, the devastation of cities and peoples. Of course, resilience, cunning, bravery, kindness. Stories and songs that shine a path in the darkness. Is climate change the enemy we must vanquish or is it ourselves? Bertolt Brecht is often quoted: ‘In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times.’ Songs, epics and their heroes are not just sources of comfort but of knowledge, awakenings and spotlights on both suffering and persecution but also their antidote. It’s widely agreed that Homeric epic was recited to audiences. The first lines of both Homer’s epic invoke story and song. The first line of Virgil’s Aeneid is ‘I sing of arms and of the man’ – (arma virumque cano). A society is built on its myth and its heroes, its people buoyed by their songs, rabbits are no different. Perhaps we should look to their examples of heroism before we turn to the disorder and injustice of our own world.

Written by Alex J.

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