Silflay Hraka, u Embleer-Rah

I apologise for the lack of entries regarding books. I also apologise for the profanity that heads this entry. I was so surprised when I read it in the book to which I have been giving clues over the last two weeks that I just had to use it as a heading. It is Lapine from Watership Down and if you want to know what it means, you will have to go to a Lapine Glossary. There is also a Blog with the same title which, the author explains is because rabbits do indeed Silflay Hraka and it seems a fitting image for the recycling of words which blogs seem to do.

Anyway, back to Watership Down. I read it first when I was 12 and then maybe again just before I was 20 so it is nearly 20 years since I last read it and I have to say I have forgotten most of it or missed the significance of a lot of the text because I was too young. The old statement "many levels" is often applied and it really does apply here. As I read it I kept thinking of allegories and analogies to human existence. Richard Adams makes it obvious that rabbit society is as complex as anything we might have - in some ways more complex because we do not have to contend with real danger. The allusion to Greek tragedy is also clear as it was in "The Girl in a Swing". There are also references to the human rejection of religion in response to material comfort - in Cowslip's warren, the rabbits are "farmed" and have lost the spark of belief in the old rabbit gods. The heroes of Watership Down rekindle the beliefs and this is made obvious by the absorption of the story of Hazel and Company into the stories of El-ahrairrah as told by the new does to the kittens after the final battle. Very Lord of the Rings you are thinking? Much more realistic. One of the reviewers on Amazon said that their teacher told them to look at the story as what humans do to each other. I actually thought that Adams did a wonderful job of giving the rabbits their own moral code which is not our own. You realise that you may not agree with how the rabbits behave - they are not romantic and they do not grieve in the same way that we do though they have a huge instinct for survival - but you wish for them to do the right thing by their own codes. Read it if you have not already and re-read it if you read it when you were too young.

Listening to :- Canario from Fantasia para un gentilhombre - Rodrigo