The Enid Blyton Society

Thanks, Philip. I'll check them out as soon as I can.

Another book you might enjoy is The Forest by Sonia Hartnett. It is about a group of feral cats in the Australian bush - sounds terrible but is actually really interesting and thought provoking. Possibly a bit like Watership Down in some ways.

I borrowed some of Felix Salten's books from the library as a child (Bambi, Bambi's Children and Fifteen Rabbits.) Thought-provoking stories which would probably appeal to people who like Watership Down. The books were originally written in German but I found the English translations exquisite.

Anita

Amazing book and film and i am a member of the Bright Eyes brings me to tears club actually i sob lol ( also the song from Dumbo baby mine has the same effect

im sure i saw plague dogs at school film day one saturday when i was about 9
i think it was plague dogs im not sure so if anyone wants to correct me but i remember being extremly upset and scarred by dogs getting run over on the train tracks

If rabid dogs freak you out, don't watch a movie called "Cujo".
It has some pretty scary scenes.

I loved Watership Down. It's probably the only book (asied from Enid's) that I read and then went straight back and read again.

It's a great book. My favourite characters are Bigwig and Hazel.

Just realised we don't already have a thread dedicated to Richard Adams — the news has just come through that he passed away today, at the very respectable age of 96. Here's his obituary from the BBC.

Watership Down has been a huge favourite of mine ever since I first read it at the age of 7 or 8 — it's one of those books that has always stayed with me. I also read and very much enjoyed The Plague Dogs when I was 16 — another animal story, but this time a darkly funny satire about the cruelties of lab experiments and the power of the press.

R.I.P. Mr Adams and thank you so much for listening to your daughters when they begged you to write down their rabbit story that you made up for them in the car!

We had a topic that was just called 'Watership Down' so I've merged the two threads.

RIP Mr Adams.

RIP Richard Adams.

RIP Richard Adams. I read Watership Down and Shardik as a teenager (after having seen the cartoon film of Watership Down as a child). Very interesting to view the world from such unusual and imaginative perspectives.

Thanks for the thread merger, Anita — I obviously didn't look far enough when I went searching for an existing Richard Adams thread.

I've never read Shardik — I did have a copy when I was in my late teens, but my dad warned me it was a bit "brutal" and that put me off. Funnily, though, I was never disturbed (let alone terrified) by Watership Down as a child, either the book or the animated film. I enjoyed the film but have always preferred the book — the film leaves a lot out and doesn't quite capture all the depth of the original story.

Here's an interesting interview with Adams from a couple of years ago that I found just now: Richard Adams on Watership Down: "Perhaps I made it too dark" I don't think he did at all, but that's just me.

I gave in to temptation earlier this year and bought the new illustrated edition of Watership Down. I must admit the illustrations are a little odd — the rabbits in some of them are a bit awkward-looking and not quite naturalistic — but the colours are beautiful and they're lovely to look at. Here's one of the best of them, where Hazel, Bigwig and Silver meet Kehaar the seagull:

Thanks for the link to the interview, Courtenay. I first watched Watership Down when I was eight and all those gruesome gashes that the rabbits suffered did stay in the mind a bit. However, I loved the film and was struck mainly by the beauty and wistfulness of the story and animation.

That's a lovely picture from the new illustrated edition.

RIP Richard Adams, I love both book and film of WATERSHIP DOWN and will no doubt revisit both in the not too distant...

Just thought I'd post here again with a few more bits that other fans of the book might find interesting...

Not long ago, I bought another illustrated edition of Watership Down, this one published in 1976. The illustrations are a lot more naturalistic, I must say, than the more recent illustrated edition I posted about before — they're line drawings, some of them coloured, and really quite beautiful, I think. Here's the cover:



I should throw in a mention of the excellent second hand bookshop where I found it, in the charming East Sussex village of Robertsbridge! (Didn't see many Blytons there, but I wasn't really looking at the children's books. The lady who owns the shop is lovely, though, and I would highly recommend a visit if anyone's in the area.)

This particular edition also has a large pull-out version of the map, in colour, showing all the locations in the story. I was always aware, even when first reading it as a child in Australia, that all the places mentioned in Watership Down are real (Richard Adams says so in the note at the start), but funnily enough, it's only just today that I took the trouble of looking them up in detail. I wish I'd done so a few years ago when I was living near Reading — I had no idea then that I was literally less than 15 miles from the real-life settings of one of my favourite books ever!

There are a few walking trails in the area, but the best-looking one I've found online is this one published in the Guardian some years ago, which is circular and includes Watership Down itself and Nuthanger Farm, as well as other sites of natural and historical interest in the area: The Watership Down warren, Ecchinswell, Hampshire

One of these days when I have a couple of days off and can spare the time, I might have to go on a little Watership Down holiday in northern Hampshire and see it for myself! There's even a Watership Down Inn in the area that has rooms for the night, so that looks like another literary holiday sorted once I'm ready...

Oh yes, and another thing I discovered while Googling — some rather obsessed fan has created a whole website with a course in learning Lapine, the rabbit language used in the book and its sequel, with detailed explanations of grammar and the two different forms of the language (colloquial and formal). This rather flies in the face of what Richard Adams himself tells us in the introduction to my newer edition (2014) of Watership Down — "There is no grammar or construction in the language. It is simply a motley collection of substantives, adjectives and verbs" — so I have absolutely no idea where the author of that site is getting all this Lapine from. But I have to admire his dedication, even if I don't quite share it...