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Watership Down Analysis

Decent Essays

Watership Down is a classic adventure novel written in 1970 by English writer Richard Adams. The novel focuses on a small wandering group of rabbits whose’ names are: Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, Holly, Blackberry, Pipkin, etc. Although, they live in their own world, they possess a culture much like humans do. These rabbits have their own poetry, music, mythology, and language called Lapine.
Lapine has different words with roots derived from many different languages. Some words include: Frith, the sun, Ni Frith, noon, and Fu, after. There are hundreds of other words in the novel but one of the most significant is the word elil. Elil refers to the natural predators of the rabbits, like foxes, humans, and badgers. However, it is not a coincidence the Lapine word elil closely relates to the English word evil.
Throughout Watership Down the rabbits encounter different forms of elil, and they respond to them in different ways. In the novel, all the elil, whether it is the rabbits, cats or dogs, seem to circle back to humans who are the biggest form of elil in Watership Down. An example of this would be when the humans destroyed Fiver and Hazel warren, and Holly, who was there when it happened, said, "All other elil do what they have to do and Frith moves them as he moves us. They live on the earth and they need food. Men will never rest till they've spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals." With the events that Holly described when their warren was raided, one of the ways the

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