Years ago, fantasy writer Michael Moorcock attacked the popular works of Tolkien (Lord of the Rings), C.S. Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia), and Richard Adams (Watership Down) as Epic Pooh — comforting, unchallenging, and conservative:
I sometimes think that as Britain declines, dreaming of a sweeter past, entertaining few hopes for a finer future, her middle-classes turn increasingly to the fantasy of rural life and talking animals, the safety of the woods that are the pattern of the paper on the nursery room wall. Old hippies, housewives, civil servants, share in this wistful trance; eating nothing as dangerous or exotic as the lotus, but chewing instead on a form of mildly anaesthetic British cabbage. If the bulk of American sf could be said to be written by robots, about robots, for robots, then the bulk of English fantasy seems to be written by rabbits, about rabbits and for rabbits.
In Into the Woods, James Parker takes a different point of view:
But writing off “Watership Down” as a manifesto of middle-class conservatism misses the point; the book’s unique effect resides not solely in the comforting, cabbage-muffled discourse of the well-behaved rabbits, but in the irruption — into their quiet, grey world — of violence and domination.For this was the other sphere of Adams’s experience: Prior to his career in government, he’d had an action-packed war, serving in the Middle East and then participating, as an officer in the 1st Airborne Division, in Operation Market Garden, the calamitous and bloody Allied attempt to clear the main bridges in German-occupied Holland. The Second World War shaped him as irresistibly as the first had shaped those other primary English fantasists, Tolkien and Lewis: “I must confess,” wrote Adams, “that it was the high point of my life, and the rest has been little more than an aftermath.”
Active duty is no guarantee against whimsy — A.A. Milne, creator of Winnie the Pooh, was a signals officer at the Battle of the Somme — but the marks of Adams’s war on “Watership Down” are plain. The lines of power in the book are drawn with brutal clarity, from the Owslafa — the Gestapo-like enforcers of General Woundwort’s warren — to the more improvised and benign, but no less efficient, command structure used by Hazel and his band of runaway bucks. And the novel’s violence, ever-threatening, occurs with a terrible, scuffling abruptness, leaving half-severed ears, torn haunches, nostrils filled with blood. The frozen state of “tharn” — defined in the book’s “Lapine Glossary” as “stupefied, distraught, hypnotized with fear” — is a facet of rabbit-hood, certainly, but its human version is shell shock: locked terror, the draining away of courage.