Watership Down the story was "nothing like that at all." Adams said that the rabbits in Watership Down did not worship, however, "they believed passionately in El-ahrairah". Adams explained that he meant the book to be, "only a made-up story... in no sense an allegory or parable or any kind of political myth. I simply wrote down a story I told to my little girls". Instead, he explained, the "let-in" religious stories of El-ahrairah were meant more as legendary tales, similar to a rabbit Robin Hood, and that these stories were interspersed throughout the book as humorous interjections to the often "grim"
Watership Down 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." The concept of the hero has invited comparisons between "Watership Down's" characters and those in Homer's "Odyssey" and Virgil's "Aeneid". Hazel's courage, Bigwig's strength, Blackberry's