"In the Warren, More Stories than Passages" - Interpreting Mythological Motifs in Richard Adams's Watership Down

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to collect and attempt to categorise all the noteworthy representations of mythological themes, figures, archetypes and motifs in Richard Adams’s 1972 novel, Watership Down. For implementing this task, both chapters are replenished with various studies and definitions written down by leading thinkers of the literature of mythology in order to reach a better understanding of certain phenomena. As a literary work, Watership Down is conclusively mythopoeic, and one of its appeals can certainly be discovered in its mythic construction: being simultaneously universal, local and individual.