Watership Down

In Chapter 26 of Watership Down, Adams quotes a passage from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces: “On his dreadful journey, after the shaman has wandered through dark forests and over great ranges of mountains [...] he reaches an opening in the ground. The most difficult stage of the adventure now begins. The depths of the underworld open before him” (293).

Campbell’s book deals with a literary form called the Hero’s Journey, in which a protagonist leaves home, travels through a dangerous land, faces daunting challenges, grows in spirit, finds things of great value, and returns home in triumph. Watership Down is a form of this type of story: The main protagonist, the rabbit Hazel, leads his people from their doomed home to a new and better place, from which they journey into a dangerous land to retrieve new and valued members for their group.

A famous ancient epic poem, the Aeneid by Virgil, tells of a hero who leads a group away from the doomed city of Troy, and they establish a new city, Rome. In an introduction to Watership Down, Madeleine Miller writes: “The story can be seen as a sort of