Episode 340: Watership Down by Richard Adams, Introduction, Ch. 1-10

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast — Episode 340: “Watership Down by Richard Adams, Introduction, Ch. 1–10”
August 4, 2026 | Hosts: Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks embark on a slow reading of Watership Down by Richard Adams, covering the book's introduction and chapters 1–10. The discussion centers around first impressions, the rich literary tradition informing the novel, Adams's inspiration and publication struggles, and the archetypal “exile from home” journey underpinning the narrative. Both hosts bring erudite, lively commentary, engaging personal stories, and literary allusions that illuminate the book for both new and returning readers.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Encounters with Watership Down and Initial Impressions

• Angelina reveals this is her first time reading the book, while Thomas has read it once previously ([02:23]).
• Both acknowledge the book’s evocative timeliness, artistry, and emotional impact, with Angelina noting her initial resistance due to its animal protagonists ([02:48]).
• Notable Quote:
  “You’ll love it. It’s the Aeneid with bunnies.” — Thomas ([02:30])

2. Audience, Genre, and Literary Quality

• The hosts highlight that Watership Down defies easy categorization:
  • It is not exclusively for children nor adults ([05:29]).
  • Adult style/language; rejected by publishers for being “about talking bunnies” but too adult for children ([05:29]).
• The book is described as:
  • A beast fable, fantasy, myth, epic, political utopian novel, and allegory ([16:16]).
• Notable Quote:
  “Richard Adams emerges not just as a storyteller, but as a master teller of many types of stories.” — Robert Miltner, quoted by Angelina ([16:05])

3. Richard Adams: Biography & Writing Genesis

• Adams was an Oxford-trained historian, WWII veteran, and UK civil servant—a member of the “Greatest Generation” ([20:25]).
• The story began as an oral tale for his daughters on long car trips; they requested he write it down ([20:25]).
• Adams faced seven rejections before a small niche publisher took the manuscript ([21:59]).
• The book quickly sold out, becoming a modern classic and was subsequently adapted into an animated film ([28:52]).

4. Literary and Mythic Archetypes

• The hosts foreground the similarities between Watership Down and literary epics:
  • The Aeneid: Story of exile, guided by prophecy, seeking a new home ([32:25, 46:31, 47:50]).
  • The Exodus: Israelites fleeing oppression, wandering in search of a promised land ([49:15]).
• Notable Quote:
  “We are all, because of the Fall and the exile from the Garden of Eden, exiles from home, trying to go toward a promised land we can’t see with our eyes. Every journey story is a journey of the soul.” — Angelina ([50:00])

5. Metafiction: Myths Within the Rabbit World

• The rabbits have their own language (“Lapine”) and mythos, e.g., the story of their trickster ancestor El-ahrairah ([37:39], [53:29]).
• The myth features Frith, the creator, and explains the rabbits’ vulnerability and cleverness—a parallel to the book’s central tension ([54:07]).
• Notable Read Aloud:
  “All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a thousand enemies. But first, they must catch you…” — from Adams’s rabbit mythology, read emotionally by Thomas ([57:30–58:23])

6. Literary Devices: Epigraphs and Maps

• Angelina: skips maps due to personal preferences but never skips epigraphs ([29:43]).
  • Epigraphs serve as interpretive keys to each chapter; one epigraph (from Napoleon) is debated for its authenticity ([61:13]).
  • The use and meaning of epigraphs in literature is discussed, including how J.K. Rowling employs them ([31:57]).

7. Chapters 1–10: Narrative Arc and Themes

• The rabbits’ world is idyllic yet fraught with mortal danger—both natural and, increasingly, manmade ([36:19], [41:08]).
• Early chapters establish a caste structure—Ausla (military class), wise elders, and runts/outcasts ([37:09]).
• Fiverr is the “Cassandra” figure, whose warnings go unheeded by “the government” (Chief Rabbit) ([34:36], [35:10]).
• A small group of rabbits (Hazel, Fiverr, Bigwig, etc.) become exiles, paralleling Aeneas leading Trojans from burning Troy ([43:53]).
• Their migration obstacles echo epic tradition:
  • Exile and the lure of returning “home.”
  • A perilous river crossing (symbolically, the Jordan or Aeneid’s rivers) ([63:06]).
  • Encounters with crows, tractors, and the threat of human-driven destruction ([66:25]).
  • The motif of “crossing the threshold” into the unknown ([77:04]).
• The journey divides into idyllic moments and brush-with-death dangers, underscoring the rabbits’ perpetual vulnerability ([59:02], [67:09]).

8. Allegory and Interpretation

• Adams denied creating an allegory, yet the book is archetypal and full of symbolic echoes ([18:43]).
• The hosts discuss the difference between authorial intent and the deeper meanings unlocked by the reader or the “imagination” ([19:30]).
• Malcolm Guite’s idea: “the imagination is smarter than the author” ([19:30]).
• Symbolic journey motifs, loss of “home,” and seeking the unknown permeate both the story and discussion ([47:51]).

9. Genre Context and Literary Tradition

• The book sits apart from other 1970s children's literature (e.g., Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary) by emphasizing myth, epic, and a more “adult” or literary style ([26:25], [27:39]).
• Comparison with stories written by (and for) children by parents (e.g., Wind in the Willows, Ella Montgomery, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling) ([23:14], [25:29]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Angelina on Adams’s Style:
  "I was delighted to find out it is written in an adult style. It is not writing down, not at all." ([05:29])
• On Mythic Resonance:
  "I started laughing because I was like, yep, this is the Aeneid. If you have not read the Aeneid, don't worry, we're gonna walk you through this." — Angelina ([02:48])
• On Literary Topsoil:
  "It's just a really, really well informed book...growing out of a rich topsoil." — Thomas ([17:15])
• On Reader’s Role:
  “Authors are the last person you can ask what their work is about — the muse of interpretation and the muse of story are two different muses.” — Angelina ([18:50])
• On Literary Archetypes:
  “Every journey story is a journey of the soul.” — Angelina ([50:00])
• On the Myth of El-ahrairah
  “All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a thousand enemies. And whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you.” — Richard Adams, read emotionally by Thomas ([57:30–58:23])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro & Purpose – [00:18–03:48]
• Host’s Reading Histories/Book Selection – [01:45–03:48]
• Genre, Audience, Style – [04:01–05:35]
• Richard Adams Biography & Writing Genesis – [20:25–28:20]
• Publishing Struggles, Children Inspiring Great Works – [22:12–26:22]
• Literary Influence & Archetypes (Aeneid, Exodus, Epic Traditions) – [32:25–51:09]
• Rabbit Mythology Read-Aloud – [54:07–58:23]
• Epigraphs & Map Discussion – [29:43–31:57]
• Chapter Breakdown (Events, Characters, Themes) – [36:19–70:36]
• On Allegory, Authorial Intent, and Imagination – [18:43–20:08]
• On Genre, Literary Context (1970s Children's Books) – [26:25–27:39]
• In-depth on Pilgrim’s Progress, Allegorical Reading – [70:00–76:23]

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Flow & Engagement

The hosts maintain a warm, erudite, occasionally teasing tone, freely ranging through myth, literary history, and their own personal reading lives. Their conversational style allows for rich digressions—on epigraphs, childhood reading prejudices, and the meaning of archetypal stories—while always tying back to the journey of Hazel, Fiverr, and the exiled rabbits.

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If You Missed the Episode...

This episode is an ideal starting point for readers new to Watership Down or those curious about its deep roots in myth and epic. Angelina and Thomas offer interpretative tools—tracing the novel’s DNA from The Aeneid and Exodus to classic allegory and fable—while also celebrating Adams’s originality and emotional resonance.

Listeners are encouraged to read epigraphs with care, to consider the power of allegory even where the author denies it, and to watch for the perennial obstacles facing any pilgrim—be rabbit, Roman, or reader—on the journey from a lost home toward a promised land.

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Next Up:
Chapters 11–20, further exploration of archetypes and new perils for Hazel & company.

Find more:
Upcoming classes, webinars, and community offerings at HouseOfHumaneLetters.com.

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Selected Quotes with Timestamps

• “You’ll love it. It’s the Aeneid with bunnies.” — Thomas ([02:30])
• “We are all, because of the Fall and the exile from the Garden of Eden, exiles from home, trying to go toward a promised land we can’t see with our eyes. Every journey story is a journey of the soul.” — Angelina ([50:00])
• “All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a thousand enemies. But first they must catch you.” — from the myth of El-ahrairah ([57:30–58:23])
• “Authors are the last person you can ask what their work is about; the muse of interpretation and the muse of story are two different muses.” — Angelina ([18:50])
• “It's just a really, really well informed book...growing out of a rich topsoil.” — Thomas ([17:15])

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Rich in insight, humor, and literary depth, this episode unlocks the many-layered art of Watership Down—‘not just book chat’ but a true journey of literary companionship and discovery.

Transcript

[A]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the science, skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The literary life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford, and with me is my own little fuzzy bunny. No, not at all. Oh, you could see the face.

[B]

Do that again.

[A]

Ah. You're not my fuzzy bunny. Absolutely not. The mysterious Mr. Banks.

[B]

Oh, well, Ms. Stanford, it's good to be here.

[A]

It is good to be here. We have taken a nice long summer break, but we are back with a brand new series on Watership down by Richard Adams, a book that was requested by many, many people. And I am quite excited to talk about this today. We're going to cover chapters one through 10, but we're mostly going to introduce the book, the author, the time period, the genre, all the things that you have come to expect from the Lit Life podcast. But let me just tell you a little bit about how this book selection came about, because I have never read this book. Book before. Mr. Banks, how many times have you read it?

[B]

Only once, as I recall.

[A]

Okay. But I know this is a book that a lot of people feel very intensely about.

[B]

Oh, yeah, no, it's, it's. It's a part of a lot of people's childhoods.

[A]

Right, right. So it wasn't a part of my childhood, but of course, I mean, I knew about it. And you kept saying, hey, people want us to do Watership Down. And I was kind of hemming and hawing, and then you said to me, you'll love it. It's the Aeneid with bunnies.

[B]

It is the Aeneid with Bunnies.

[A]

And then I said, all right, I'm sold. So what I decided to do again, if you're brand new to the podcast, you won't have any idea what I'm talking about. But if you've been around before, you know that I like to do a lot of research for the podcast, and I decided to do kind of an experiment for this episode. And not do any of that. I was going to let Mr. Banks teach this book to me. I was going to come in cold and kind of give you guys the real time experience of what it is like when I read what am I thinking about, what are things I'm looking for and what are the questions I have that I then go try to answer via research? So that is what I have done here. And I'm, I'm excited. I've read the 10 chapters and the very, very charming introduction by Richard Adams, which I really liked a lot. And we're going to talk about that. But I'm smitten. 10 chapters in. Right away, first chapter, I started laughing. I was like, yep, this is the Aeneid. If you have not read the Aeneid, don't worry, we're gonna, we're gonna walk you through this. But you got quite excited.

[B]

It's poignant and violent and suspenseful and like, there's humor as well. And yeah, it's, it's one of those books that, that, yeah, I think I, if anything, would have wished to have discovered earlier.

[A]

I'm already charmed, you know, And I think part of the reason. How do I explain this? Part of the reason. I think I never picked this up as a kid. Let me explain to you this way. When you go to visit Flannery Oconnors house, you will see the books on her bed and you will see what she loved and what she hated. She loved Grimm's Fairy Tales, she loved Shakespeare. She hated anything that was written for kids. That is me, okay? I, I just. I mostly read classic children's literature as an adult. When I read it out loud to my kids, I just did not read those as a kid. I didn't. I'm sure it's something about my makeup, but I just really sort of, if

[B]

it was popular, you didn't go. So we talked about this when we did, when we did the first Harry Potter together, I, I deliberately turned my nose up at Harry Potter when it came out because, like, everyone was reading those and I didn't want to be everyone. So, yeah, that's. I, I kind of. I sympathize, Ms. Stanford.

[A]

I sympathize talking animals. I presumed there was a childishness about it. I'm delighted to find out that is not the case. In fact, I found the story, which we'll talk about more fully in just a second. But he tells a story in the introduction about the publishing history and that people turned it down and one of the publishers said, well, Grownups won't read it because it's about talking bunnies, and kids won't read it because it's written in an adult style. So I was delighted to find out it is written in an adult style. It is not a copy.

[B]

It's not writing down.

[A]

Not at all. It's not what I, it was going to be at all. And I'm, I'm quite delighted.

[B]

I think, I think maybe that might be the fruit of his not having written it for children generically, but having written it specifically for his daughter.

[A]

Point. But before we jump in, let's quickly let our listeners know what we've got coming up at the House of Humane Letters. If you knew Mr. Banks and I, our day job is we are teachers at the House of Humane Letters where we teach online classes, host a conference, all the things to help you go further into the literary tradition. In fact, our tagline for our business is restore. No, sorry, recover the intellectual tradition. I can't even get the tagline right. There you go. So the podcast is free. It will always be free. It is 100% member supported. We don't have any ads here, but we do like to tell you what's going on at House of Humane Letters in case you want to dig deeper into any of these subjects. We're so thrilled to be able to provide year long classes, mini classes, webinars. There is a number of different starting points and price points. Often our webinars will go for three hours and only cost $18. So you get a lot of bang for a very small buck. And I'm also really excited that we have been getting more and more scholars drawn to the work we're doing. And so to that end, let me tell you about the webinars we have coming up this month. So next week, August 10, Addison Hornstra, who is getting her degree in Asian Stud Studies and is now affluent in Chinese and has just absolutely fallen for that Chinese tradition. And it's really interesting because she has come to understand that the more she understands about the Chinese tradition, the more she understands about her own and vice versa. And so again, if you've heard us talk before about the Tree of Tales, story is the tree and Western literature is one branch and Eastern literature is another branch. And you really do need both branches to make a tree. And so this is going to be a really fun webinar called what Became of the Weaving Maid Spindle, An Introduction to Chinese Folklore. So if you've had any interest in finding out about the Chinese literary tradition, their folktales their fairy tales, their fables. This will be a great introduction to that. And that is August 10th. On August 19th, pinch me, pinch me, pinch me. Dr. Michael Drought is back for another webinar. This one's called A Look Back at the future 100 years of science Theory Fiction. He just finished teaching a class at Wheaton where he's a professor on science fiction and is going to be wrangling all of that into a couple of hour presentation for us. And I'm excited because he's going to go through, you can read the full description, by the way, on the website, but he's going to go through all the nuances of how sci fi develops as a genre. He's going to start with Frankenstein and what's different between sci fi and fantasy or horror and the different types of sci fi. He's going to throw a bunch of authors in there and we're going to be able to get a timeline of the scientific fiction tradition. And I'm, I'm really looking forward to that. He is a fantastic speaker, very popular with our students and really, really knows his stuff. And we've never done anything on sci fi before. And I personally am looking forward to having him introduce me to some new authors because Northrop Fry always says that the romance tradition is alive in fantasy novels, detective novels and sci fi novels. And if you've been listening to the podcast, you know I love a good detective novel. So I'm interested in exploring the romance tradition in science fiction as well. So that's going to be August 19th and again you can go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com click on the mini Classes and webinars tab and it'll bring you up to everything that we've got going on. And just briefly, we are it's almost that time to launch the new school year. If you have your eye on any year long classes, there's still time to sign up for that. Again, you can go to the website and see the full description of everything that we offer. But we have two special classes this year taught by visiting college professors, one in this fall and one in the spring. So just very briefly, Dr. Jason Baxter from Benedictine College is teaching a class for us in the fall called Where Do We Go From Here? Reading for Life. So he's going to be taking you through various genres and help you develop a reading plan for life. And he's going to go over the different genres, epic and tragedy and lyric. And you know, he's a delight and everyone loves him. And if you've enjoyed any of the books he's published with our publishing house, Cassiodorus Press. He kind of sees this class as the sequel to why Literature Still Matters. Like if he made the case to you in his book that literature does matter and you're like, well, what do I do now? This class is for you. So that's a semester long class. And in the spring, pinch me again. Dr. Michael Drought, who is at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for the book he wrote on Tolkien, he's the world's most foremost scholar on Tolkien living. Right now he's going to be teaching a 16 week class on Tolkien for us. It's called Tolkien's Creation. And go read the full description of this because it's going to be a really interesting class. Of course you're going to go through Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, the Silmarillion, but he's also going to go through Beowulfs and Tolkien, Sir Gallon and the Pearl, and looking at the monster and the critics and, and just all the things that fed Tolkien's imagination and how they come through here. And again, this is a class that he taught at Wheaton and he is recreating it for us for $350. Guys, where else you're gonna get that? You can take an actual college class with no writing assignments. You just come in and read and enjoy and soak it all in with one of the best scholars in the world, who is a fabulous teacher by the way. And yes, this will not be too highbrow. He taught a class for us last fall on the Vikings and there were literally students there from 12 to 78 and everybody loved it. So he's a great teacher. So you can go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com Again, click on that Mini Classes webinars tab and you can find out everything that we've got going on. And later during this series, in a couple weeks, we'll announce a September webinar that Mr. Banks is going to be doing for us on John Bunyan.

[B]

Yes, I think it's best that I do this one and not you. I think you might. You. Yours would probably be as or more interesting than what I'm going to present. But I think it might, I don't know, ruffle some feathers, make some enemies.

[A]

It's what I do. Yeah, it's what I do. All right. We like to start off our episode by sharing a quote from something in our commonplace books. Mr. Banks, what's the quote? You've got.

[B]

So mine needs a little bit of background. This is from A History of Britain during the Napoleonic wars by Charles Petrie. The title of the work is When Britain Saved Europe. And he's describing here the Earl of Sandwich. Who is the earl after whom Sandwich is named? I had not realized that he was one of the most disreputable gentlemen in Britain. He was a really, really, like, the kind of guy who would hang out with the Prince Regent, sort of disreputable.

[A]

It's so interesting because while he personally sounds like a terrible person, I don't think we should cancel the name Sandwich.

[B]

No, we don't have to start calling it.

[A]

Yeah, A bread jacket. Yeah, a bread jacket. Because we don't want to say Sandwich because we're. We're canceling the Earl of Sandwich.

[B]

Don't. Well, yeah. Not give them any ideas. Okay, so this is him in his private hours. He is even said to have held burlesque services in his village church, preaching blasphemous sermons to a congregation of cats.

[A]

Was he insane? Like, literally? Was he out of his mind?

[B]

I don't think so. I think that was. That just amused him. Like, how did he get all these cats in the church, though? I'm. Yeah. Yeah. Is he. Is he. Could he, like, could he actually herd cats?

[A]

Okay. He's the cat whisperer. Okay. That's. That's what's happening here. No, I'm just gonna say this. I realize this is a shameless plug from my husband, but you are a fabulous history teacher. You really are. Everybody who takes a history class from you, our webinar says it's like you're just talking about. You know, and it's true. You do. You make it seamless. If. I'm telling you, if you guys have any interest in history, go sign up for one of Mr. Banks's history classes. Because you. You just bring all of these amazing anecdotes to class. Like, you. These people are real and alive and fully dimensional and.

[B]

And, well, that's kind of the joy of the discipline for me.

[A]

Right. I have often said that I think you're a biographer by nature. Like, I think that you're. You think like a biographer. You capture. You capture lives very, very well. We have different minds, you and I. I think you're the mind of a biographer. Just so you guys know, at home, I have been trying to convince Mr. Banks that he is a modern Plutarch and needs to write biographies for Cassiodorus Press.

[B]

I am.

[A]

You can tag him on Twitter and tell him that he very much needs to do that.

[B]

Well, thank you very much. I, yeah, I'll just, I'll pin that badge on my shirt and wear it.

[A]

MP Modern Plutarch. That's your award. Okay, so my commonplace quote, and I'm going to back up just a second because I can already hear somebody saying, you said you didn't research this book. And I did not, I did not read a single thing about this book before I read the chapters. And as soon as I started reading it, I started laughing because I was like, okay, this is the Aeneid. I totally see where this is going. And I know because I've read quite a bit of Northrop Fry, what Northrop Fry says about the archetype of the Aeneid. And so just right before we sat down to record, I quickly did a Google search where I searched Watership down, north of Fry to see what came up because I wanted to see if anybody had explored more fully the, the Aeneid archetype in the book. And I found an article which had a. Was about Watership down, had a lot of quotes from Northrop Fry and it's got a great paragraph I'm going to share with you. But the funny thing is you don't know that this is what my commonplace quote is. And before we press record, you basically said exactly what this guy said. Okay, so we'll read it and then you can, you can add what you were saying to me right before we press circle. All right, so this is a scholar named Robert Miltner and it's called, it's an article called Watership A Genre Study. One of the most remarkable aspects of the book is that it is not one fine story, but simultaneously so many fine stories, so many types of stories. To a greater or lesser degree. Watership down is a beast fable, a fantasy, a mythological tale, an epic, a political utopian novel, a. And an allegory. Richard Adams emerges not just as a storyteller, but as a master teller of many types of stories.

[B]

Yeah, and I, I think I said before we were recording that this is kind of a My Favorite Things book. It's, it's the work of a very well read man, you know, obviously very well educated man who at the time he wrote it was not a professional writer and he actually had a very difficult time getting this book produced. But it has elements of pastoral and obviously with talking beasts. You know, the, the fable tradition is at work here. And you mentioned the Aeneid, obviously. I think there's even a biblical note or two It's a reference to br.

[A]

Rabbit in here.

[B]

Yes. And they have their. And, and the rabbits, as we'll see, have their own kind of folklore and mythology.

[A]

I got so excited with every chapter about their mythology.

[B]

Okay, I, I'm gonna, we'll read aloud. I'm gonna try to keep it together. But there's a passage that in these first 10 chapters, it's one of the most famous in the book that actually almost makes me cry every time I read it. It's. And I'll read it aloud and I think I'll be able to contain myself.

[A]

Oh, you have to cry on the air.

[B]

No, we're not going there. We're not going there. But yeah, this is, yeah, it's, it's just a really, really well informed book. It's a book that has a. That is growing out of a rich topsoil.

[A]

We were talking earlier too, before we press record, that you were surprised to find out this was written in 1972.

[B]

That's another thing I thought it was.

[A]

It feels timeless.

[B]

Yeah. I had to say I knew that he had been in World War II and I thought he wrote this immediately after. But no, I thought it was older too. Yeah. It's almost as. Not to date you or anything like that, but 1972, that's baby Angelina.

[A]

That's Baby Angelina. Correct. Correct. No, there is something very timeless. And thinking about this book and thinking about Richard Adams mind, I was actually reminded a lot of the Malcolm Guy interview we did where you know, he, he talked about how the imagination just absorbs all of these things and then it comes out and that's what it feels like. Like, like he wasn't a writer, quote unquote. He was a dad telling a story to his daughters. And we'll tell that story in just a minute. But he's obviously well read. He's just immersed in this. Like you said, there's. There's a great rich topsoil there. And so that, that's, that's how good stories are grown. They grow out of that topsoil. And you know, the quote I just read says that this is an allegory and it obviously is. I'll have more thoughts of that as well. And he denied that, specifically the introduction.

[B]

Yeah, he seems like very self effacing and he says no, this is not a, this is not some kind of comment on our world or the whatever.

[A]

But immediately I thought of Malcolm Gite. Because of course my, my position as a scholar of literature is that authors are literally the last person you can ask what their work is about because the. The muse of interpretation and the muse of story are two different muses, okay? They don't have to understand what it is that they've written. And like, you know, Shakespeare famously thought, you know, some of his works were failures and Tolstoy thought Anna Karenina was a failure. And, you know, like, you can't listen to those guys. They don't know. Right. Just like I. I'm my worst judge and my worst critic. You're always having to tell me, I. I don't have any sense of if succeed or not, because I just feel like everything's a failure.

[B]

Angelina interprets Angelina very badly.

[A]

Right. So I. I really liked when I asked Malcolm Guy that question, you know, and he said, oh, no, my imagination is smarter than me. My imagination knows more than I do. So. Right. So. So I. I believe that Richard Adams means, when he says it's not an allegory, that I didn't sit down and have some big master message in my head. I believe that. Okay? But as Malcolm Guy pointed out in our interview, the imagination knows that these things work better than you do. And if you're. And if he's pulling from these huge archetypal stories like the Aeneid and mythology and folklore, like those elements, it has,

[B]

like, all these kind of resonances that. Yeah, and I'm.

[A]

It's there even if you don't.

[B]

And I mentioned in his introduction, he doesn't mention the Aeneid at all. He does mention some other books and in particular, one actual work of zoology, which was.

[A]

All right, well, okay, let's jump in there. Why don't you start us with an introduction to Richard Adams, and then we'll go through, like, how he wrote this story and its publication history, because I found that all super interesting.

[B]

So Richard Adams is part of the greatest generation. He's a veteran of World War II. He read history in I forget which, Oxford College. And so, yeah, his life, like those of most people of his generation, interrupted by the war. He was posted in the Middle east in some kind of minor administrative capacity during his war years. And after the war is over and he finishes his. Call it collegiate studies, he became a civil servant. He was involved in various environmental conservation projects. He's the kind of guy, I think, that a living author, I think Wendell Berry and he could have exchanged notes profitably. And, yeah, as far as I know, he had no interest really, in producing any fiction at all until, you know, he became, you know, a married man with two daughters and they would take long road trips together. And during the road trips, he would entertain them with stories that he had made up. And during one particularly long road trip of some hundreds of miles, he told them this, the. The outline of the story that became Watership down. And they challenged him to actually put this one on paper. And he did. And I mean, it's such a well told story that you might think that. Oh, yeah. And then like, you know, there was of course a feeding frenzy with all the publishers and everyone wanted to get a hold of this. Not actually true. I think he was rejected, he said.

[A]

Seven times.

[B]

Seven times. Yeah, he was. He, like, nobody wanted to touch this book maybe because it is kind of old fashioned. I don't actually know it makes sense or. What did he say? That it was a book for children, but it wasn't written like it was written for children.

[A]

Right. He said adults wouldn't be interested because it seems childish because it's about talking rabbits and kids won't like it because it's written for adults. And you know, understanding that this is 1972 actually helps me because this is very, very similar to the story that Madeline Lingle tells about a wrinkle in time. It's almost identical. She. She writes the story for her kids.

[B]

And is that published about the same?

[A]

It's about the same. I'd have to look it up.

[B]

60s maybe?

[A]

Yeah, it's late 60s, so it's. You got to figure it's the same publisher mindset. You know what it is? What, what, what, Mark? What's a kid book? Quote unquote. It's the same like J.K. rowling, the American audience, they're too long.

[B]

The Harry Potter books are too long.

[A]

Philosopher in the title. Because they thought kids won't read a book about a philosopher. The Philosopher's Stone is not about a philosopher. But I digress. But you know, my favorite stories about stories being written are the ones where it's a dad telling a parent telling the story to a child. I mean, that's Wind in the Willows. That's.

[B]

And there's a. You mentioned also that there's a lot of windows here.

[A]

There's a lot of. This feels very Wind in the Willows to me. I mean, you know, he, he wrote it for his child.

[B]

Same love of landscape and place.

[A]

Tolkien stories he wrote for his children. The Father Christmas letters. Lewis Carroll made up Alice in Wonderland to entertain George McDonald's children. And they were like, daddy, Daddy, he has to write it. So I love that. And that was also Madeleine Lingle. That when she was discouraged, her kids are like, no, we have to know what happens next. Keep going, keep going. And I'm just going to say this because I've thought a lot about this as a person who has children, a mother, otherwise known as a mother. But there's so much emphasis in our culture at the idea that our children are holding us back in some way. Right. If I didn't have these kids, I could reach my full potential. I could go into my vocation. So I am particularly fascinated with stories where it works the other way, where Richard Adams would have given up, but his children kept saying, no, no, no, you have to do this. Right? And Madeleine Lingle would have given up, but her children were like, no, you have to keep going. We have to know, right? Even in my own life, because I left academia and homeschooled my kids instead of being a college professor, so many doors have opened up for me that never would have opened up otherwise, Right? So I. I like. I just. As an aside, I like stories where it's actually, no, your kids didn't stand

[B]

in the way right now. Wish that you were, like, at a conference in some. Some Midwestern you presenting a paper on Elizabeth Gaskell for six people, you know, the academic underground.

[A]

And professors are fleeing their colleges and coming to me. And every time they share with me more stories, I think, thank God I'm not there. Thank God I'm not there. But, yeah, like, some. We don't think about the fact that sometimes your kids are the. The avenue by which you can. You can achieve your vocation. Right. It's wrong to think of them as standing in the way. Anyway, that's just my little aside about that, but also very similar publication history. So he said in his introduction, he got shot down seven times. Madeleine Lingo got shot down like, I don't even know, like, 50 times. I don't remember. But that's a lot. Enough that anybody else would have stopped, like it was a running joke that she'd be at dinner parties, like, trying to push this manuscript on everybody because her husband was an actor in New York.

[B]

Wasn't he a soap actor?

[A]

Later he became a soap opera. He was Dr. Tyler on all My Children. Okay. You know, I did not find. Yes, that's right. Madeleine Lingle's husband was Dr. Tyler on All My Children in the 80s, and I had no idea my mother watched All My Children. So like many 80s kids, I grew up, you know, with that in the background. And Dr. Tyler was this old guy, and I was obsessed With Madeline Lingle. I had no idea that was her husband. I did not find that out until I read, I guess, a Circle of Quiet, one of her. One of her memoirs. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Your husband was Dr. Tyler? Anyway, interesting point, but she got shot down for the same thing. They said, we don't know how to market this. What is this? It's for kids, but it's too smart. Is it sci fi? Is it fantasy? So the fact that Watership down is kind of genre blending and bending in the same kind of way as a wrinkle in time. Like, the publishers just don't know. They don't know what to do with anything that's unique. Yeah.

[B]

And yeah, for 19. I mean, it is a long book. It's.

[A]

It's.

[B]

I mean, what, 400 some odd pages here? I mean, I guess in any time in the latter half of the 20th century, that would be a hard sell by itself. And in the 1970s also, that's not really a period where the mythic is something that's being marketed to children a lot. I mean, you're getting. I mean, I'm trying to think of, like, what's a typical 70s book. I guess the Ramona books are coming around. Yeah. Judy Blume, Ramona Books.

[A]

Judy Bloom.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yep. I would say this is before kind of the 80s babysitter club boom that J.K. rowling is facing. Yeah, we talked about that in the Harry Potter episodes. How, you know, Harry Potter was extremely different from everything else coming out. But yeah, the seventies.

[B]

Judy Bloom, Encyclopedia Brown.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Judy Boom. Beverly Cleary. Those would have been. Those would have been the big ones. Lois. Lindsay Lowry. Lois Lowry. She was another big one.

[B]

Yeah. I guess the giver is probably.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

No, no, that's later on. That's later on.

[A]

Yeah. Thinking of a different. Different. Anyway, I'm drawing a blank.

[B]

But yeah, I mean, all of those. I mean, and nothing against any of those necessarily, but those are.

[A]

Chiptown is very different from them.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay. So if that is what a publisher is looking for, this is a very different kind of kind of book. And so he gets it published by a really, really. He gets all these rejection letters and he reads a review of some really small publisher that, like, reprinted some obscure Victorian book. And he thought.

[B]

He thought, maybe I can get a toe in the door here.

[A]

Anybody who is interested in this weird thing might publish my book.

[B]

But yeah, again, like, you know, I'm. I'm producing a work that would be interesting to the kind of People who published works that were written a hundred years ago. And that's kind of my only in. And then of course after that it got, you know, it quickly sold out its, its small printing run and then got picked up by.

[A]

He is. He comes across as deeply humble in the introduction he wrote. And again, just as an aside, I, I very rarely read the introduction to a book but if it is written by the author, I, I do read it and it was very charming. And he's clearly humble because he said like nowadays he'd have just self published on Amazon. Right. But he's like, all I thought is I'd buy like 10 copies and give it to my kids and be like, ta da. It's the book. Like he never, he never imagined. And then it gets picked up by macmillan and it becomes this huge thing. And how long after do they make the movie? I've also never seen.

[B]

I think the movie's late 70s, early 80s, so within a decade seen scenes from it.

[A]

So I know it's like.

[B]

And of course if you're. It's a Right. It was a rite of passage for people of a certain age, my age roughly, to watch this movie and be horrified by it as a child. And I won't say why it's horrifying. But yeah, I, I found out that the actor who does the voice of the principal rabbit, Hazel, in the movie is John Hurt, who played the Elephant Man.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And also the guy in Alien who has the thing come out of his chest. Yeah, that. So that actor. Yeah.

[A]

Well, that's a creepy voice.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Or he can do a creepy voice.

[B]

Yeah. But it's kind of a frail and thin voice too. It's. And yeah. Anyway. But it's. Yeah. If your children have strong stomachs, that that movie Watership down maybe will be for them if you don't mind them sleeping in your bed for the next several years.

[A]

So the first thing I noticed when I opened the book again, I come into this cold. So I'm giving you a little peek behind the curtain. What's it like? When I read first thing I did is I went over the table of contents and I saw that it was divided into four. Four parts and part one is the Journey. Okay. So we're going to learn all about the Journey archetype here and what that's about because he is absolutely 100 tapping into all of that. But that's just the first thing I did. I'm going to horrify a lot of people, but I'm going to say I Always skip a map. Tolkien, Lewis, Adams. I skip a map, and it is because of my autism. It is because I have the little thing where I can't picture things in my brain, blah, blah, blah. All the things you can love the map. I'm not saying there shouldn't be maps. I read detective stories that have detailed maps.

[B]

Some people I skipped more into that than the story I knew. I knew more than one kid growing up. This says something about the circles I moved in. I knew more than one kid who could reconstruct, sketch out Middle Earth, basically from memory.

[A]

Believe that. I am not criticizing anybody who does that. Don't say that skill. I'm just saying if you're somebody who's maybe felt guilty that you skipped the maps, I am here for you. I skip the maps. I don't find them helpful at all. I mean, I. I have my own thing going on in my imagination. It's why I don't like illustrations either. I. They're offensive to me. We've talked about this before. I realize I am.

[B]

You have your own mental picture.

[A]

I realize that I am very much in the minority here, and most people love a beautiful illustrated edition. I got no interest in that. I don't know. I'm not interested in how somebody else pictures it.

[B]

I find I will usually either admire illustrations very profoundly or I will hate them if it, you know, especially if it's a book that I know and love and that I pick up, you know, something that has woodcuts added to it in a, like, Franklin press edition. And it's like, yeah, that's not. That's not how I see the book sometimes, though. It works for me, and it's hit or miss.

[A]

You know, you said at the beginning I couldn't do the John Bunyan webinar because I'm too controversial. And here I am throwing all my most controversial opinions out there. But anyway, this is what this is, right? You're getting a peek at how I approach a book and I skip the map. But I was very excited to see something I never skip, and that's epigraphs. I was very excited that this book has epigraphs. Let's talk about epigraphs.

[B]

Yeah. So a brief quotation at the beginning of a work, or sometimes the beginning of every heading of each new chapter in a work, which is either indicative of something that's about to happen or illustrative of a principal theme or something like that.

[A]

Right. So if you listen to the very first series we ever did on this podcast, back in 2019, on Dorothy Sayers, gaudy Knight. That is where I explained how epigraphs work and how we're supposed to think of them.

[B]

Hilariously, at least one epigraph here is the subject of a lot of Internet debate, because there's actually no source for it. But we'll get to that.

[A]

Oh, okay.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Spicy. Now I've lost my train of thought.

[B]

J.K. rowling.

[A]

No epigraphs. Well, I was going to say that, too. Okay. So when I'm teaching, I always tell my students that they are supposed to pay attention to an epigraph, that it is not random or arbitrary, that it actually is there because it is an interpretive key to the chapter. The author has chosen this to give you some sort of hint about what you can expect or how to interpret what you've read. So it's really helpful advice. But of course, people don't understand that now. So what my husband means with J.K. rowling is I am a big fan of her detective series, the Corman Strike books, and she is like the queen of epigraphs. I mean, the first time I opened it, the opening quote was from Boethius, and I was like, I'm in. I'm sold. Right. So she's very, very careful about her epigraphs. And it's very exciting to me as a reader to try to track what's going on and to see the parallels. My favorite one is Troubled Blood, where she does the fairy Queen. And because I know the fairy queen very well, I can guess what's going to happen in the chapter based on the thing. Anyway, it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun, and it's important. But I remember seeing this review online. It was like an Amazon review, and the woman was complaining. She was like, these books are so great, but I wish she would stop putting those quotes at the beginning of the chapter. Like, she said, they don't have anything to with the story, and they're just distracting, and I skip them. And part of me died. If you felt that way, like when I said I skipped the maps, if you felt like part of you died. Okay. That. That's how I feel when someone says they skipped it.

[B]

There is a type of person who skips epigraphs and footnotes.

[A]

But I was very excited here, and I was also very charmed by what he said in the introduction about the epigraphs, that his daughters really liked them and said something like, oh, they're so fun. Because at the Beginning of the chapter, you don't have any idea what this is going to have to do with anything. And then as you keep reading, you realize what it does and yeah. So immediately it opens with a quote from Aeschylus's Agamemnon. So I can tell you that as a first time reader who knows nothing about this book, I thought tragedy. We're about to have tragedy.

[B]

Prophecy here.

[A]

Prophecy.

[B]

Because specifically, I'll read this out loud. So. So from Agamemnon by Aeschylus. Chorus why do you cry out thus? Unless it's some vision of horror? The house reeks of death and dripping blood. Chorus how so? Tis but the odor of the altar's sacrifice. Cassandra. The stench is like a breath from the tomb.

[A]

Right. So I got really excited because Fiverr is obviously Cassandra and Richard Adams does say that in the introduction. So let's explain about who Cassandra is.

[B]

So Cassandra was a Trojan priestess who had been cursed by the God Apollo with the gift of prophecy that would always be proven true in the event, but never believe before it. And in the Agamemnon, she is prophesying Agamemnon's death, his very bloody and gruesome death. And this falls upon deaf ears. And then of course, Agamemnon is murdered by his wife and her lover Aegisthus.

[A]

Right. And so as I was reading this chapter, just in case I say I don't know how it ends, so don't come at me. I can guess. Since it's the Enid, I could guess how it ends. But the reason I saw Aeschylus, Agamemnon, I thought tragedy. The tragedy is for people who do not hear and listen to Cassandra. Right. So we are confronted at the beginning with Fiverr has a feeling we need to leave and that is going to result in them being exiled from home, which we'll talk about that when we get to it and that's when we'll bring up the Aeneid. But go ahead, talk to me about anything you want to say about chapter one. Teach me this book, oh wise one.

[B]

So from the beginning, it's really kind of a beautiful world that these rabbits live in. But it's not a idealized world, I would say. I mean, it is, you know, kind of that charming English countryside, but at the same time it's a while being a pleasantly pastoral world they inhabit. It's one which, in spite of its loveliness, danger is never very far away. Right. And you know, we, we learned that there are not just biological reasons for this, but supernatural ones. As well in a couple of chapters. And the rabbits always have to be on the alert here. And we learned that their society is actually a. A caste society, a hierarchical kind of

[A]

tribal clan kind of situation.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. With your military clan, the ausla. And you have the wise old rabbit, who's maybe not as wise as he used to be. And then you have the weaker runts of the litter, like Fiverr, who do not hold any kind of place of privilege. And even though Fiverr's prophecy is going to be proven true, he doesn't find that many people are listening, aside from his brother Hazel and a few others. We'll see.

[A]

We didn't mention the language, although you just used one of the rabbit words, so. Yeah, so he made up a rabbit language. But he says in the introduction, like, you know, this is not Tolkien. No grammar would probably. Yeah, he said he just tried to pick words that sounded fluffy, just sound like the sorts of things a rabbit would say.

[B]

And also some of the names, whether of, you know, the rabbits ancestral enemies or of their. Their hero, sort of the. The Adam, the patriarch of the rabbits, El Ara. He said he wanted to give them kind of a Middle Eastern Arabic flavor.

[A]

Yeah, Because.

[B]

And they sound suitably exotic, so I think he does. This is something I admire about Richard Adams. He names things. Well, that is a gift that some writers have and others do not. Tolkien, I think, actually, is kind of hit or miss when it comes to naming characters and things.

[A]

Senior hate man.

[B]

No, no. Some of Tolkien's name choices are brilliant. I mean, he was obviously a brilliant.

[A]

No, I know. I. Okay, I will tentatively agree with you.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Even though the Tolkien hate's gonna come in strong, he has philological reasons for the names that he chooses, and they all have a deep meaning. The problem for somebody like me is that they sound too much alike. Sauron and Saruman, Come on. I can't even keep Edmund and Eustace straight in my mouth. They sound too much.

[B]

MOG is a hard sell for me too.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Anyway,

[A]

so at the end of chapter one, we see a sign. So we see that this beautiful pastoral land is actually going to be turned into suburbs.

[B]

The rabbits here are obviously anthropomorphic rabbits. But he said when he wrote this book, Richard Adams, that he was going to set some limitations here. He wasn't going to have them do anything physically, he said, with one or two exceptions where I cheated, he wasn't going to have them do anything physically which an actual rabbit can do.

[A]

I love that he said that. He said he got that Influence from Rudyard Kipling's just so.

[B]

Yes, yeah. So like Ricky Tikki Tavi also is an anthropomorphic, not a weasel. What is he?

[A]

Should we define anthropomorphic?

[B]

Yeah, anthropomorphic is given human qualities. And I think the only way to write about animals in fiction is to give them at least some human qualities.

[A]

See that in, you know, Beatrix Potter.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, so. So, yeah, Ricky Tikki Tavi, you know, he a mongoose, not a weasel. He's a mongoose. So like mongooses do, he actually goes into snakes holes and kills them and like that. But he also, you know, sings songs about, you know, his killing of snakes. And the rabbits here are. Yeah, kind of. Kind of in that sort of Kipling tradition where they have human or quasi human mental lives and they can carry on conversations, but at the same time they are frail creatures. He tells us they can't count higher than four and they don't. They don't remember things very well, aside from, you know, ancestral stories handed down to them.

[A]

So at the beginning here, the sign saying this is about to be developed into, you know, a modern suburb means that this ideal world is about to be destroyed. And the pastoral tradition, like say you see it in Shakespeare, is something where you see them out in pastures in this beautiful nature. This is supposed to be the lost Edenic world. So there's always going to be some sort of threat to it. It's always going to be temporary in some way. And so here we have this ide. Know, paradise that they live. I use ideal in quotation marks, right?

[B]

Idyllic.

[A]

Idyllic, right. It's idyllic because it's. Yeah, it's idyllic, not ideal.

[B]

That.

[A]

Good distinction. But the thread is there and. And Fiverr is the one who can see that this is all going to be destroyed because they're going to be making a suburb. But as we see in the next chapter, no one is interested. Are very few people. The leadership are not interested. So in the Chief Rabbit we have a Henry Vaughan. Now this is the metaphysical poet Henry Vaughn.

[B]

Yes, Henry Vaughan, 17th century PO of the Metaphysical poets. He was a clerk, a country clergyman as well, he was Welsh. And this is a great quotation. The darksome statesman hung with weights and woe like a thick midnight fog moved there so slow he did not stay nor go. And the chief rabbit. I get the impression that this rabbit is a hero of yesterday who has outlived his best.

[A]

Yes, he's interested in keeping the status quo and not having that ruffled.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, really, I mean, this. This rabbit, Fiverr, who is he, after all? And he has trouble remembering names. He thinks Hazel is named Walnut. And yeah, he's so his.

[A]

Because they're just so beneath him. Why would he even know their names?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But one of them is intrigued. Big Wig. Now, I. In the 10 chat again, I've read nothing but the 10 chapters here. I like Big Wig, even though they're scared of him, like, he might be. A little control. And now don't tell me if I'm right or not, but since this feels very needed to me, I'm like, is Big Wig gonna have an Aristea? That is okay. His face is not giving anything away. An Aristea is the moment when the main warrior just goes on like a killing spree in an epic and they just smash. Achilles has an Aristea. Patroclus has an Aristea. Aeneas has an Aristea. So, right.

[B]

So having failed to sway the government, the chief of the rabbit tribe, the Hazel, and Fiverr, they decide that whoever wants to join us, they can join us. And we will go off in defiance of the Owlsla and, you know, the military cast, and we will. We will go our own way. So this is not going to be. Be, you know, an exodus of all the people here. It's just going to be a kind of ragtag band of survivors, like. Like in Troy, like in.

[A]

You know, and I'll talk about that in just a minute because what's going to happen in the next chapters? They decide to leave, but then they are pronounced as exiles. They can either return or they're going to be considered out of the. The clan. And they're going to be. When they escape, they get into a

[B]

scuffle with some of the. Some of the bullying rabbits.

[A]

Chapter three, we've got a quote from your guy, Xenophon.

[B]

Yeah, so. And Xenophon, by the way, a very readable Greek writer. He wrote history, biography, works on horsemanship and hunting. So very a writer of many various talents. He was a student of Socrates, an Athenian nobleman, and he took part in a adventure, one of the great adventures of history. This is one of those things that should belong to fiction, but it really happened. He and some other mercenaries, the famous 10,000, were hired by the younger brother of the King of Persia, who was trying to overthrow his brother and needed a mercenary army. So these Greek mercenaries, they traveled into the heart of the Persian Empire and they took part in the Battle of Kunaxa, which they Won. Unfortunately, the would be usurper Cyrus ii, who was the younger brother who had hired them, was killed in this battle. So they now find themselves without an employer. And the reason that they came to Persia being lost and they had to fight their way out of the Persian Empire back to Greece. It's. Yeah. So the. The Anabasis, which basically just means the campaign or the expedition. That's a very, very exciting and very readable book.

[A]

And why do you think that's the epigraph of this chapter? Because they're going to be the band, kind of.

[B]

Yeah. You have this ragtag band who's surrounded by enemies in the middle of. Yeah, this middle of the world that they don't necessarily know that well. And they're trying to get their way out of it.

[A]

And so chapter four is the departure because they have to leave. They're being officially exiled under penalty of death here because they are taking this as treason. They're being traitors to the. To the tribe. It's not.

[B]

It.

[A]

Was there a name? The Warren, maybe?

[B]

The Warren Warren, yeah. Yeah.

[A]

Is that the group of rabbits?

[B]

Yeah. And. And the network of tunnels in which they live.

[A]

That's. That's going to become a big thing in these chapters too, is that they don't have this underground place to hide.

[B]

Yes. So they're exposed. And also another theme, and this is true of almost any pilgrimage road journey story, which involves more than one person. You're going to have some people who are more sure of their purpose than others and other people who start asking, maybe we should go back. Maybe we shouldn't have come this far. The murmuring of the Hebrews in the desert against Moses. There's going to be something of this as well.

[A]

All right, let me talk a little bit right now about the Aeneid. And no, I'm not going to give you a complete summary of the Aeneid, but I'm going to talk about it in terms of the story archetype that it is is because I did see some people in our Patreon discord saying, well, I haven't read the Idiot, but you guys were picking up on a lot of amazing things. And I read it and thought, oh, gosh, leave me something to talk about, please. So I will be affirming a bunch of the things that you guys saw. You all correctly saw that this is an exile from home story that is the Aeneid archetype. So what happens is the Aeneid picks up right at the fall of Troy. It is a story of The Trojans, whose home has been burnt down and destroyed. Okay, now the implication here in this story is that this rabbit warn is going to be destroyed when they build this suburb. But they don't know yet. So Fiverr, as the Cassandra figure is able to see before the fall, we've got to get out. But in the Aeneid, Troy is burning and the gods come to. To Aeneas and say, you need to grab a remnant of these Trojans and flee and you're going to go to the promised land. And so it is the journey of exiles who can. This is. This is not the Odyssey. The Odyssey and the Aeneid are two different archetypes. The Odyssey is Odysseus is not exiled from home. He has left home to go to war and now he's returning home. The Aeneid is a different story because

[B]

you don't know where your home is.

[A]

That's right, because it's been destroyed.

[B]

Aeneas has promised a new kingdom, but it actually takes several books for them to discover. You know, is it like in some Mediterranean island? Is it in Sicily, Is it in Africa? Where. Where are we supposed to go?

[A]

So, and again, I presume this is going to come up in the story. I won't say too much here, because I presume this is going to come up in this story. But there are some particular dangers and temptations that will get in the way of the exiles making it to the promised land. And we'll talk about what those particular dangers are as we encounter them in this book. But it is the story of exiles who cannot return home because there is no home to return to. And they don't even know. They. They're promised some. Some golden future, but they're not really sure it actually exists. And there's going to be a number of temptations and obstacles.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

So now, having said that, some of you might have been guessing what biblical archetype this is. Mr. Banks has been referring to it as an exodus. Many of you in the Patreon Discord said the same thing. And correct. Northrop Fry points out that the biblical archetype echo for the Aeneid is the story of the Exodus. So Moses, like Aeneas, takes a handful of exiles, more than a handful, but a group of exiles who don't have a home. Right. The Israelites do not have a home. Well, they're not even the Israelites yet. They're the Hebrews, right? No, they're the Israelites. They're the Israelites, but they call them the Hebrews.

[B]

Keep going with that.

[A]

Okay, I'm sorry. Sorry. Words are hard today. So they don't have a home, and they leave to go to this promised land, and they go through a long wandering, and they also have a number of obstacles and temptations that keep them from getting that promised land. Right. And we'll make those connections as we go through the book because they're the exact same temptations that come up in the Aeneid. So in the medieval imagination of reading things allegorically, that is reading them spiritually and symbolically. If you want to know more about that, go check out my latest conference talk, which is where I explain all about St. Augustine and how he teaches you to read the Scriptures and how he teaches how that then becomes the basis for all medieval ways of reading. And I go through some. I go through three different stories to show you what that looks like. But for the medieval in a nutshell, reading on the surface like we do, the who, what, when, where, that was considered illiteracy. That was not reading. It was the ability to read through the surface to the deeper symbolic and spiritual meaning underneath. That is what it meant to read. So for them, a story like the Aeneid was an obvious journey of the soul to God, just like with Moses, that we are all, because of the Fall and the exile from the Garden of Eden, we are all exiles from home, and we are all trying to go toward a promised land that we can't see with our eyes. We're maybe not sure it exists, and there's a whole bunch of temptations and obstacles on the way. So every journey story is a journey of the soul story when understood symbolically and spiritually. And the Aeneid is one of the archetypes. The Odyssey is the other one. And again, it's tying into the. To the Exodus story. So there'll be. There'll be more to come. But well done, those of you who read it and picked up that this was an Exodus story. That's. That's exactly what it is.

[B]

So shall we talk about the mythology of the rabbits a bit?

[A]

Let's.

[B]

Okay. So in the chapter, I was so delighted. This is one of my favorite chapters in the book, the story Blessing of El Ara. I think I'm saying that correctly.

[A]

Okay, before we get to that, since I'm gonna forget chapter five, the epigraph is from RM Locky's Lockley's Private Life of the Rabbits. And I wanted you to talk.

[B]

Okay. Yes. So Lock. RM Lockney, he was a. Also a conservationist, and he wrote a. A Very became a very popular work of, I guess, kind of layman's zoology. He was an expert on all manner of mammal life and friends with Richard Adams. And Richard Adams went to this book for most of his facts about rabbits. And he's kind of an interesting figure himself. And Lockley was, amongst other things, friendly with the. The Huxley family. He and Julian Huxley, who was also a well known scientist. Julian Huxley was the lesser known brother of Aldis. They were professional collaborators and knew each other as friends as well. So yeah, there's that connection. And when he died, he was well known enough Lockley to be profiled by the New York Times. And whoever wrote this obituary forum used the opportunity to take a potshot at Watership down, saying that that Watership down, of course, is not as good an introduction to rabbits as Lockley's the Private Life of the Rabbit because of all the silly anthropomorphism and sentiment involved. I know it's.

[A]

That hurts my heart.

[B]

I know it's. It's ridiculous.

[A]

As much as I hurt people's hearts when I said I skipped the maps, please forgive me for that, but I. I won't look at your map. And Aldous Huxley, we should say, is the author of Brave New World and we did a podcast on that last year. All right, Chapter six, the Story of the Blessing of. You're right that it sounds Turkish, Hebrew.

[B]

L. I think he. He said he wanted. He wanted an air of Arabic, sort of speak Arabic.

[A]

So please forgive me that I butchered that.

[B]

So.

[A]

But I love that he gives us a mythology right here in the middle of the story. Yes, in the middle of the chapters we read, I should say.

[B]

And so we're told that this hero, who's kind of. They kind of a sly prince and trickster, he was enjoying being a rabbit a little bit too much. He was a little bit too good at begetting his kind. So Frith, who is the God of the rabbit universe, decided that he was.

[A]

It's a figure in Viking mythology called Thrith. And I wondered if he was going for that.

[B]

Yeah, it reminded me of something, but I didn't know what.

[A]

She shows up in Beowulf. It's the taming of the thrift story. She's the. She's the Jewish wife who has to be tamed.

[B]

All right, so. So the. The Prince of rabbits has begot too many rabbits and Frith, his God, decides to do something about that. Then Frith said to El Ara, Prince Rabbit, if you cannot control your people, I shall find ways to control them. So mark what I say. But El Ara would not listen. And he said to Frith, my people are the strongest in the world, for they breed faster and eat more than any of the other people. And this shows how much they love Lord Frith. For all the animals, they are the most responsive to his warmth and brightness. You must realize, my lord, how important they are. Not hinder them in their beautiful lives. So instead of just smiting El Ara, Frith decides that he's going to arm the rest of creation against his people. So he summons the other animals of the world to a meeting. But he tells. He makes sure that Frith doesn't attend. And he gives gifts to all of the other animals. And the other animals are given claws and fangs. And cats receive eyes that glow in the dark and cunning, and, you know, a predatory nature. And the rabbits are given none of these things with which to defend themselves. And then when El Ara realizes that the world is now turned into an enemy of him, he receives one thing and. Let me. Let me read this then. El Araira knew that Frith was too clever for him, and he was frightened. He thought that the fox and the weasel were coming with Frith. And he turned to the face of the hill and began to dig. He dug a hole, but he had dug only a little of it when Frith. Frith came over the hill alone. And he saw El Ara's bottom sticking out of the hole and the sand flying out in showers as the digging went on. When he saw that, he called out, my friend, have you? And isn't this kind of like Adam and Eden hiding from God? It is almost kind of ashamed.

[A]

Yeah. No, it's a false.

[B]

Have you seen El Ara? For I am looking for him to give him my gift. No, answered El Ara without coming out, I have not seen him. He is far away. He could not come. So Frith said, then come out of that hole and I will bless you instead of him. No, I cannot, said Al Araira. I am busy. The fox and the weasel are coming. If you want to bless me, you can bless my bottom, for it is sticking out of the hole. All the rabbits had heard the story before. On winter nights, when the cold draft moves down the worn passages and the icy wet lay in the pits of the runs below their burrows. And on summer evenings, in the grass under the red May, in the sweet carrion scented elderbloom, Dandelion was telling it well. And even Pipkin forgot his weariness and danger and remembered instead the great Indestructibility of the rabbits. Each one of them saw himself as El Araira, who could be impudent to Frith and get away with it. Then, said Dandelion, Frith felt himself in friendship with El Ara because of his resourcefulness and because he would not give up even when he thought the fox and the weasel were coming. And he said, very well. I will bless your bottom as it sticks out of the hole. Bottom. Be strength and warning and speed forever and save the life of your master, be it so. And as he spoke, El Arara's tail grew shining white and flashed like a star, and his back legs grew long and powerful, and he thumped the hillside until the very beetles fell off the grass stems. He came out of the hole and tore across the hill faster than in creature in the world. And Frith called after him, el Araira, your people cannot rule the world, for I will not have it so. All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a thousand enemies. And whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you. Digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks, and your people shall never be destroyed. And El Ara knew that although he would not be mocked, yet Frith was his friend. And every evening, when Frith has done his day's work and lies calm and easy in the red sky, El Ara and his children and his children's children come out of their holes and feed and play in his sight, for they are his friends, and he has promised them that they can never be destroyed.

[A]

That was so good.

[B]

I know that. That just kills me every time I read that.

[A]

It's so good. So we get the sense through this myth here.

[B]

I've seen T shirts with part of that. Yeah. Not the whole paragraph, but yeah. And when they find you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you. I know. I've seen that as a T shirt. I don't wear T shirts very often myself, but that's a good T shirt design.

[A]

I think that's a good one.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Be a good bumper sticker on your car.

[B]

It would.

[A]

So their mythology definitely gives us the sense that they are aware that they're very vulnerable and they live in a dangerous world. And there are many threats to them, which going to see even in just the next couple of chapters.

[B]

But there's also, like a supernatural providence which protects them and.

[A]

And that they're smart and fast and they. So they can use their wits and their speed.

[B]

Yes, yes.

[A]

But that's very much in keeping with both the Exodus and the Aeneid, that

[B]

they're a chosen people kind of.

[A]

No, exactly.

[B]

They're smaller than their neighbors. And it's like. It's sort of like, you know, in the Book of Numbers, you know, one of those corners of the Bible that. That probably we don't visit very much. But remember when Moses sends the scouts out and they come back and they say, no, we're like grasshoppers, you know, in the side of these men, giants. And. Yeah, this is the. The rabbits are kind of, in their own way, in a world of giants as well.

[A]

Right. And so in the Exodus story, it is made clear that their vulnerability is meant to showcase the divine blessing of God and his protection. It's the same thing in the Aeneid. The gods are guiding him here. And so, yeah, he's definitely picking up that same. That same echo. Yeah. As well as using your wits, which, of course, you have the, you know, Jacob as the archetypal trickster in the Bible.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

So, yes, using your wits, Jacob would

[B]

do well in this story, I think.

[A]

Yeah, it would. Yeah. All right.

[B]

Okay. So I mentioned the. That some of these epigraphs, or this one in particular, if you look this up, you can find Reddit threads dedicated to this. So this quote from Napoleon Bonaparte. Yeah. It might be apocryphal, and he gives it in French. So as for moral courage, it is very rarely found. He said that of the two hours after midnight kind, that is to say, the courage of the unexpected. So he seems to be describing how it's difficult to be brave in the face of unforeseen danger. Like when an army is attacked in the middle of the night, night at 2 o', clock, and you're having to fight when you're still asleep. And it sounds like something Napoleon would say, but evidently no one has traced it to any source of Napoleon's correspondence or memoirs written by officers who knew him. So it could be just one of those things, that. One of those quotes that is fathered on Napoleon. Sort of like people attribute quotes to C.S. lewis and Martin Luther King and Gandhi that they didn't actually say. So this might be one of those.

[A]

Okay, okay. So they. They get to a river. We'll talk about that in just a second. But Fiverr has continued to have a vision of what can only be described as a promised land. But they're not sharing that with everybody. Because Hazel thinks you sound crazy.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

But it's clear that they are. Just like with Moses, just like with Aeneas, they are being led by A vision of a promised land.

[B]

Yeah. And also the fact that the two leaders, insofar as we have leaders, Hazel and Fiverr, are not of the leadership class. And Fiverr is the smallest rabbit in the warren. He's frail. He's a runt. And that's. Isn't that kind of exodus like itself?

[A]

Very much.

[B]

Moses is not confident. He doesn't want this job. You know, when God speaks to him from the bush, he says, I'm, you know, I'm not a man who can speak on your behalf. I need my brother and all that kind of stuff.

[A]

No, the pair of brothers. Yep. No, I felt that, too. I felt that, too. So they get to the river, and they conclude Fiverr and Hazel, that they're going to have to cross it. But they're tired, they're weak. It's scary. And I think it's Bigwig who says the only way to get them to cross is if there's something they're scared enough of on this side to push them over. And then he. He says he sees something. Now, as I was reading, I was like, did he really see that or does he just.

[B]

Yeah. Are there actually dogs?

[A]

Was he just giving them the motivation to cross?

[B]

I hadn't thought of that. Oh, you might be right.

[A]

But either way, they cross the river. Okay? So, I mean, Aeneas leaves Troy and has to cross a river. The Israelites have to cross a river when they leave Egypt. This is. This is a.

[B]

There's always going to be some sort of. Some sort of going to be.

[A]

This is crossing the Jordan for them. They're going on the other side now, and there's no turning back.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And after they cross the river, they. They. They pretty much get into the wilderness, like the Exodus. Now it gets really scary because there's roads and cars and tractors and other things like that, but they cross the river and they figure out that there's a piece of wood floating around and that the two. The two weaker, more tired ones can get hip.

[B]

Can. Can. Yeah. Make it across. Yes. Yes. And it's. I. I like that he's given the rabbits kind of. Kind of limited and fallible memories, so they can't even necessarily learn from their experiences all that much. And it's. It's another. Another one of these, you know, handicaps that besets them on the way to this vague promised land, wherever it is they happen to be going.

[A]

And then we get to chapter eight, the crossing. And I loved how Bigwig. I just like Bigwig. I love that he jumped Back in. And he paddled him across.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And. And he obviously is a big help. He's a warrior. He's big, he's tough. Should they meet enemies, they're going to really want him. But Hazel's also worried about the power dynamic here, that he might try to take over. He's going to be a hard one to reign in.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. It is interesting that Bigwig, from the beginning is. I mean, so far anyway, has been a subordinate, even though he's physically the strongest. And, yeah, I guess that's in keeping with sort of our Exodus theme that you find you find yourself often with a. A hero who's either unlikely or seemingly not. Seemingly not well qualified because of his physical restrictions or something like that from being a leader. But anyway, here we. Here we have such a situation.

[A]

We do. And the epigraph from here is from the Acts of the Apostles. You want to read that one?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Chapter eight.

[B]

Yeah. So this is. This is St. Paul being shipwrecked on the island of Malta. This centurion commanded that they would. That they which could swim should cast themselves first into the sea and get to land. And the rest, some on boards and some on broad, broken pieces of the ship. And so it came to pass and they escaped, all safe to land.

[A]

And that is exactly what happens in this chapter. So they. They say. So they find their. This their first big obstacle and, and, and, and they survive. Yeah.

[B]

By the way, we mentioned Richard Kipling as an influence on this story. Rudyard Kipling wrote a story told from the point of view of the captain of the boat on which St Paul was carried to the island of Malta. It's called the Manners of Men. And it's the captain in the story because you remember St. Paul is prophesying on the boat. Told from the captain's point of view. St. Paul might be insane, but the people on the crew on board this ship are then saved. And the captain doesn't really know what to make of it. Anyway, the story's called the Manners of Men by Rudyard Kipling. It's not one of his better known ones, but it's really good. Good.

[A]

So in chapter nine, the Crow and the Beanfill. So as they've been going along, there's constant conversation about how vulnerable they are because they cannot get underground if there's a threat. And so chapter nine felt like a return to the pastoral. Right. Like here's this amazing field with these flowers. And this will essentially create a situation which we're safe underground. We can. And we we can. They haven't been able to stop to rest because they, They're. They're not safe. So this is a place where they can rest and sleep and be hidden and be safe.

[B]

But then they get attacked by a crow.

[A]

But then they get attacked by a crow. So they are. They are not safe.

[B]

Yeah, it's. It's kind of a rare animal which doesn't threaten them in some way. Even something like a crow, which we don't think of as really that predatory from a rabbit's perspective, could be he could, you know, spell death.

[A]

Well, but it, again, emphasizes that once they left home, they are in danger. Just like the Israelites, just like the Trojans. I mean, the Israelites walk around and they're just, they're just sitting ducks for literally everybody. All the ites. Right, yes. The Hittites, the. The.

[B]

This, Jebusites, Canaanites. Yes, yeah.

[A]

Yes. They all, they all just, you know, they're just. Everywhere they go, there's another threat. And then, of course, they hear the gunshot and they all flee. Oh, go ahead.

[B]

And I, I said earlier that Adams did not mention the Aeneid specifically as an influence on this. He didn't mention the Bible either, though. Again, I think that must be. You know, given his background, I would think that both of those books are just sort of a part of his mental makeup that he might not even be aware of.

[A]

It could also just be that he

[B]

didn't want to compare small things to great. Maybe. I don't know.

[A]

Okay, so you figure he. 1972, he's a dad. So he went to what, Oxford in the city, 60s, early 60s, late 50s,

[B]

40s, I think, after World War II.

[A]

Okay, so he's quite a bit older by the time he writes this. All right, so. So then he's going to Oxford, the time of Lewis and Tolkien. Like, maybe he just assumes you don't even have to say the Bible in the Indian. That's entirely possible because everybody knows this.

[B]

I was actually wondering if he ever bumped into any of the Inklings since he's there in. Immediately after World War II. I don't think he was in. Was Magdalen College, Lewis's College. Okay. But yeah, and he was a. He read history, so he might not have encountered them too much on a personal level, but he could have gone

[A]

to the occasional election, possibly.

[B]

No. You know, one. One student of that generation who became very well known who was a student of Lewis was Paul Johnson. Paul Johnson, yeah, He. He said that he went to every Lewis lecture that he could Even when, you know.

[A]

Yeah. So it's highly likely that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That Adams have certainly known who they were.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay. So they hear the gunshot and they all scatter. And big wig says something like, let's hope it was the crow he shot and not a rabbit. And then they regroup and everybody's to be accounted for still. So we've survived. We've survived all the threats so far, but, you know, danger is ever present. And then they get in chapter 10, a whole new kind of threat. But first we've got a quote from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

[B]

Yes. Timorous answered that they had got up that difficult place. But said he, the further we go, the more danger we meet with. Wherefore we turned and are going back again.

[A]

All right, so let's revisit what I said about every journey. Story was understood by the medievals to be a journey of the soul, especially in particular, reading the Aeneid as the journey of the soul in the Promised Land is.

[B]

Is, I think one of the earliest commentaries on the Aeneid we have actually reads it in specifically that way.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

I want to say it's Fulgentius or

[A]

someone like that on the shelf. Let me go look, because I'm drawing.

[B]

Yeah. The one I'm thinking of probably is from the 6th or maybe 7th century. No. Bernard Sylvester.

[A]

Okay, I just looked it up. Up. Bernard Sylvester, Yes. He's. He's a con. He. He writes a commentary and takes a look at the Aeneid in terms of the journey of the soul and breaks it up as an allegory. And that then. Okay, so hear me out. The Promised land is what is going to become Rome. It doesn't become Rome in the book, but it's essentially going to become Rome. And since Rome then becomes the birthplace of Christianity, especially if you're Italian, it is the birthplace of Christianity, but it's the heart of Christianity if you're a medieval Italian Christian. And so Dante takes this idea that the. The. The promised land, the golden, perfected land that Aeneas is promised, is actually the Christian promised land. Right. He.

[B]

And so even though he doesn't live to see it.

[A]

Right. Yes. And there's. There's. Oh, I'm getting so sidetracked. My students have heard me give these speeches a million times, particularly in the fourth eclogue of Virgil. It's a poem in which it was widely perceived to be a prophecy of the birth of Christ, which it describes the coming of a baby of destiny, and the lion is going to lie down with the Lamb. And he's going to issue this golden age of peace. And Christians understood this to be an unintentional prophecy of the birth of Christ. And so Virgil was considered to be a pre Christian saint who. Who was, you know, like Malcolm Guy says, the imagination and the Muse no more than you do. So he was telling a story more than he realized. And so Dante makes that explicit in the Divine Comedy. That is why Virgil is Dante's guide in the Divine Comedy, because he's been pointing us to the promised land this whole way. And so he's literally doing it in the book. Dante becomes a character as well as the poet, and he goes through the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. And Virgil is his guide up until. Up until Paradise. So authors in the Christian tradition start to make explicit in the books what had been implicit and allegorical in the older books. That is all journeys are Journey of the Souls. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is also in that tradition. He did not start it, he inherited it. And so he makes literal what had only been symbolic before, if that makes sense. Right.

[B]

So I'll give you an example of that. So Bunyan is. And this is in some ways a blessing and in other ways a curse. He's a very vivid author, and there's a very. Even the kind of supernatural elements that his characters encounter along the road have a very. This worldly quality to them. And there's a scene where one of the boys in the second part of Pilgrim's Progress, where Christiana and the ladies are going to the celestial city. One of the boys eats some fruit from a forbidden orchard, which we are told is the devil's orchard, and he falls sick with a stomach complaint. And a. I think it's evangelist or some. Some physician gives him some pills which are said to be confected from the body and blood of Christ. And I mean, it's obviously, you know, holy communion. And he said, if you are ever visited with this stomach complaint again, take one of these pills and it will cause you to purge what you have eaten. So it's. Now, Bunyan, you could say, is making a perfectly legitimate religious point from a Christian perspective. But the terms in which he expresses that point are there's something. I don't know, there's something like almost irreligious about having the Eucharist compared to a purgative that your doctor would get you. Again, I know what he's doing because, I mean, there is a very old tradition going back at least to Saint.

[A]

He's actually ripping off the fairy queen.

[B]

Going back to this saint, Ignatius of Antioch in the first century compares the Eucharist to the medicine of immortality. But, like, when you say specifically, it's like something that causes you to vomit and you get rid of the devil's food that's in your stomach, it's like there's something overly specific about that maybe.

[A]

Okay, I was going to give the example of reading a Journey of the Soul story symbolically is to read the Aeneid and to say, oh, they keep talking about the promised land of Rome. The Promised land is obviously the Christian promised land. And so really, this is the Journey of the soul to. To. To God's. To God's world. Right. And so Dante takes that and makes it literal. So you're literally on the road. But again, there's. It's. It' dream vision in Dante. So it's not as literal as Bunyan is going to take it. Where literally some guys on a road, on a journey to a place called the Celestial City. Like, that's what I mean. And I'm not necessarily saying that as a criticism. I'm simply pointing out how the genre developed. Right. So it's. It's implicit and it's symbolic and allegorical and spiritual readings of these older books. And by the time you get to Bunyan, he's making it extremely explicit and literal and. And so Christian. The interestingly named main character of Christian. Sure. There. You don't have to read Pilgrim's Progress symbolically. He's not symbolically on a journey to heaven. He is literally on a journey to heaven.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, Bunyan is kind of sui generis. He's sort of in his own camp. He is obviously an inheritor of a long allegorical strain of writing, but he makes it his own. He makes it his own.

[A]

You can argue that the everyman tradition of medieval mystery plays is still very much there.

[B]

Yeah. In a different way.

[A]

It's not a criticism.

[B]

I'll go into all these things in my website.

[A]

Yeah, it's not a criticism. It's. I'm just pointing out that the. The evolution of the genre, that it goes from being very symbolic to being quite explicit. And then I think that when you reintroduce the fantasy genre, it gets symbolic again. Again. And you can listen to the Harry Potter episodes if you would like to see what that looks like. Okay. So there's a new kind of threat. And now they have to cross something. Not a river, a road, and this is a threat. They have never met before. This car that has its lights on. And, and they want to know what kind of animal this is that's eating other animals. And they find out it's not an animal, it's a machine, it's a car.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it can smash you up.

[B]

We gradually learn. And you could have suspected this from the beginning, that the machine and you know, the, the tractor, whatever their word for it is, the onomatopedic word, that's them describing what it sounds like. This is another one of their ever present threats which. And it's, it's in some ways more sinister than the others because they don't understand it. They knew it.

[A]

Yes. I think it's interesting that after they cross the river, they're in an unknown world where the dangers are now unforeseeable. Unknown. It's very scary. If there's a time you're going to be tempted to turn around and go back, it's now.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And I said that this book has a kind of timeless quality. I think that he incorporates modern technology when it intrudes into the story. Well, because even the. Because we're seeing these things from an animal, animal's perspective and they don't just seem like a car is not just a car. It's a guttural, noisy monster that comes out of nowhere and runs you over.

[A]

Well, we talked about the. Okay, so the myth that what they have as their defense against a threatening world is their speed and the car is something they are not faster than them. And that freaks them out. Right? Because at first they're like, wait, how is this tractor moving so fast? How is it moving faster than us? And big was because it's on a road. And they're like, what's that? So, so now their one defense in the world is not an advantage in this situation because you cannot, you cannot outrun it. And they decide that they're going to cross the road in the daylight, not at night, because it's way more dangerous. Oh, at night.

[B]

A thought before we bring this to a close. I can. I say, I think that the mythology is explicitly presented at just the right level in this. And if. I think if he had. I think if he had made a multi dimensional mythic universe the way that Tolkien did, that would weigh down the story. I don't think there's enough story to sustain that weight here, but I think he introduces just enough of it and he gives them an interior sort of spiritual universe which is shared and they have their various inherited traditions and myths and Things like that. That. But they. He doesn't pursue them digressively to a burdensome degree.

[A]

Oh, I was particularly excited about that because, of course, in both the Aeneid and in the biblical account of the Exodus, you're being led by the gods. Like, literally.

[B]

Yeah, literally.

[A]

In the Exodus, you know, God is in the cloud or the flame, and he's guiding them on. And in the Aeneid, the gods keep popping down and saying, aeneas, yo, promised land, eyes on the prize, buddy. Let's keep going.

[B]

But he, the gods or God does not promise that nothing horrible will happen to you along the way or that you won't lose some of your people.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Or rabbits along the way.

[A]

Well, I'm preparing myself for this. Yes.

[B]

I don't think it's a spoiler alert to say that not all of the rabbits are going to make. Well, I mean, you kind of figure

[A]

I'm thinking like that. Like, it's not. It's not possible that you're going to go through all these trials and everybody's going to come out and perhaps some of them will die in some heroic manner. Again, I don't know. I haven't seen the movie. I haven't read the. This, this is just me speculating. You get to see how it is. I think about stories. So already I'm thinking in terms of the Aeneid and of what I suspect are going to be the kinds of obstacles. And then I'm also. So you might be thinking to yourself, well, then how is it even fun to read if you're like, oh, I know the four archetypes that are going to come. Because what is fun for me is to see the variations on a theme. What is fun for me? It's, you know, it's like you. You like watching videos of, like, excellent guitar solos, and you're not like, oh, my God, that chord again. You're like, wow, that guy's a virtuoso. I wouldn't have thought. Look how he did that. Right. That's. That's the joy for me is I know how this story is supposed to go, and I want to see how Richard Adams is going to play with that. I know what I'm expecting in terms of the big obstacles to both Exodus and. And the Trojans. And so I'm curious, well, how that's going to play out here. And I'm expecting to be delighted that my favorite kind of reading experience is like, that, where I know what is going to happen. Then I'm like, like, oh, look, what you did there, that is amazing. I'm so impressed. That was great. Again, like hearing a great, a great guitar solo. Like, my gosh, you moved your finger so fast across that, that fretboard.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You're not like, oh my gosh, those same four chords again. Yawn. Right? So no, it does not take away the pleasure. It increases the pleasure for me.

[B]

I think you're picking up on the main features of the landscape very, very quickly. Yeah.

[A]

Good.

[B]

That's good.

[A]

Okay, well, join us next week when we cover the next set of 10 chapters, chapters 11 through 20. And let's see if we can get deeper into this archetype and what are the kind of obstacles for us on our journey of the soul to not home, but to some promised land that we have faith exists, but we're really not sure and the kinds of dangers and obstacles that come in that way. Again, you can go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to see any of our webinars, our year long classes, the two semester long classes coming up with Dr. Drought and Dr. Baxter and take a look at all that we've got there. Sign up for the newsletter as well there and you can know exactly what's going on. You can also get a copy of the podcast schedule. Well, stick around to the end. Mr. Banks has got a special poem picked out and thanks so much for joining us. And again, huge shout out to the Patreon who continues to provide this podcast free of charge for you guys and is also just my favorite place on the Internet. I'm so impressed with the job you guys are doing reading this. Well done, well done. You're seeing all the right things things. So until next time, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks

[B]

afterwards by Thomas Hardy. When the present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay and the May month flaps Its glad green leaves like wings, delicate filmed as new spun silk. Will the neighbors say he was a man who used to notice such things? If it be in the dusk when like an eyelid soundless blink, the dewfall hawk comes crossing the shades to alight upon the wind warped upland thorn, A gazer may think to him this must have been a familiar sight. If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm, when the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, One may say he strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm. But he could do little for them, and now he is gone. If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last they stand at the door, watching the full starred heavens that winter sees, Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more? He was one who had an eye for such mysteries. And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom and a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings Till they rise again as they were a new bell's boom. He hears it not now, but used to notice such things.