Watership Down of his warren's success and its future. Leaving his friends and no-longer-needed body behind, Hazel departs Watership Down with the spirit guide. "Lapine" is a fictional language created by author Richard Adams for the novel, where it is spoken by the rabbit characters. The language was again used in Adams' 1996 sequel, "Tales from Watership Down", and has appeared in both the film and television adaptations. The language fragments in the books consist of a few dozen distinct words, used mainly for the naming of rabbits, their mythological characters, and objects in their world. The name "Lapine" comes from the
Watership Down 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." It has been suggested that "Watership Down" contains symbolism of several religions, or that the stories of El-ahrairah were meant to mimic some elements of real-world religion. When asked in a 2007 BBC Radio interview about the religious symbolism in the novel, Adams stated that