Watership Down: 50th Anniversary

 by Laura Burden

Fifty years ago this month, a minor publisher called William Collings wrote to his associate, the writer Isabel Quigly, “I have just taken on a novel about rabbits, one of them with extra-sensory perception. Do you think I’m mad?” Quigly replied that it certainly sounded like a risky project and multiple publishers had already turned down this book. However, against the odds, Richard Adams’ novel Watership Down appeared to the public.

As is the case with many writers of children’s fiction, Adams found the idea for the book when telling simple stories to his own children. He worked as a civil servant but loved to take his daughters to the theatre at weekends. One day, when driving Juliet and Rosamund the long route from London to Stratford-upon-Avon, he told them a story of rabbits called Hazel and Fiver, who have to leave their warren when developers build on it, and travel to Watership Down in Berkshire to find a new home. They later begged their father to write the story down and, when he did not start the project quickly enough, used their pocket money to buy him a notebook.

Watership Down is an unusual book. In some ways the quest narrative/odyssey its plot follows is a tale as old as western literature itself. However, it is unusual in terms of being classified as children’s fiction. Each chapter begins with an epigraph (a quotation from another text) and children reading the novel encounter the words of Aeschylus, Xenophon, Napoleon and Dr Johnson, probably for the first time. Many of these are taken from Adams’ key source, Ronald Lockley’s biology book The Private Life of the Rabbit. The themes are dark - at times, very dark, especially the episodes set in the totalitarian-model warren, Efrafa. The rabbits face a world of violence - “a thousand enemies” - and many of the characters die. Perhaps most compellingly. Adams gave his anthropomorphised rabbits their own language - Lapine - and their own mythology: the main story of the rabbits journeying to find a new living place and then to enlarge and defend their warren is intersected with legends and stories of El-ahrairah, a Robin Hood style rabbit hero, Frith (the sun/God) and the Black Rabbit, a demonic figure. 

Richard Adams wrote on several occasions and also said in public that he never intended his book to be an allegory or a symbol - it was, he insisted, a “tale about rabbits, nothing more”. However, it is hard for any reader not to see parallels with Efrafa and Nazism/the Soviet Union (Adams was a British soldier between 1940 and 1946, although he never saw active combat, and later worked as a civil servant). 

Watership Down’s enduring relevance in 2022 is probably found in its ecological message. Adams was not sentimental about animals, despite a brief tenure as the President of the RSPCA, and accepted that rabbits can, at times, need to be culled. However, the book is an open challenge to anthropocentrism. The presentation of humans - who smoke “white sticks”, bring “the white blindness “ (myxomatosis) and break up the countryside with new houses and roads - is critical. Watership Down is an elegy to a countryside that we are in increasing danger of losing.