Editing Watership Down (section)

===The Hero, the ''Odyssey'', and the ''Aeneid''===
The book explores the themes of exile, survival, heroism, leadership, political responsibility, and the "making of a hero and a community".<ref name="newsweek-prescott">{{cite journal | last = Prescott | first = Peter S. | author-link = Peter S. Prescott | title = Rabbit, Read | page = 114 |journal=Newsweek | date = 18 March 1974 }}</ref> Joan Bridgman's analysis of Adams's works in ''[[Contemporary Review|The Contemporary Review]]'' identifies the community and hero motifs: "[T]he hero's journey into a realm of terrors to bring back some boon to save himself and his people" is a powerful element in Adams's tale. This theme derives from the author's exposure to the works of [[mythologist]] [[Joseph Campbell]], especially his study of [[comparative mythology]], ''[[The Hero with a Thousand Faces]]'' (1949), and in particular, Campbell's "[[monomyth]]" theory, also based on [[Carl Jung]]'s view of the unconscious mind, that "all the stories in the world are really one story."<ref name="CR-Bridgman">{{cite journal|last=Bridgman|first=Joan|date=August 2000|title=Richard Adams at Eighty|url=https://www.thefreelibrary.com/RICHARD+ADAMS+AT+EIGHTY.-a064752236|journal=[[Contemporary Review|The Contemporary Review]]|publisher=The Contemporary Review Company Limited|volume=277|issue=1615|page=108|issn=0010-7565|via=The Free Library}}</ref>

The concept of the hero has invited comparisons between ''Watership Down's'' characters and those in [[Homer]]'s ''[[Odyssey]]'' and [[Virgil]]'s ''[[Aeneid]]''.<ref name="masterplots" /> Hazel's courage, Bigwig's strength, Blackberry's ingenuity and craftiness, and Dandelion's and Bluebell's poetry and storytelling all have parallels in the [[epic poetry|epic poem]] ''Odyssey''.<ref name="rothen">{{cite journal | last = Rothen | first = Kathleen J. |author2=Beverly Langston | title = Hazel, Fiver, Odysseus, and You: An Odyssey into Critical Thinking | journal = The English Journal | volume = 76 | issue = 3 | pages = 56–59 | publisher = [[National Council of Teachers of English]] |date=March 1987 | issn = 1544-6166}}</ref> Kenneth Kitchell declared, "Hazel stands in the tradition of [[Odysseus]], [[Aeneas]], and others".<ref name="kitchell">{{cite journal | last=Kitchell | first=Kenneth F. Jr. | title = The Shrinking of the Epic Hero: From Homer to Richard Adams's Watership Down | journal = Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly | volume = 7 | issue = 1 | pages = 13–30 | date =Fall 1986 | issn = 0197-2227}}</ref> [[J. R. R. Tolkien|Tolkien]] scholar John Rateliff calls Adams's novel an ''Aeneid'' "what-if" book: what if the [[Clairvoyance|seer]] [[Cassandra]] (Fiver) had been believed and she and a company had fled [[Troy]] (Sandleford Warren) before its destruction? What if Hazel and his companions, like Odysseus, encounter a seductive home at Cowslip's Warren (Land of the [[Lotophagi|Lotus Eaters]])? Rateliff goes on to compare the rabbits' battle with Woundwort's Efrafans to Aeneas's fight with [[Turnus]]'s [[Latins (Italic tribe)|Latins]]. "By basing his story on one of the most popular books of the [[Middle Ages]] and [[Renaissance]], Adams taps into a very old myth: the flight from disaster, the heroic refugee in search of a new home, a story that was already over a thousand years old when Virgil told it in 19 BC."<ref name="wizards" />