Anthropomorphism a multitude of anthropomorphic goblins and elves. John D. Rateliff calls this the "Doctor Dolittle Theme" in his book "The History of the Hobbit" and Tolkien saw this anthropomorphism as closely linked to the emergence of human language and myth: "...The first men to talk of 'trees and stars' saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings... To them the whole of creation was "myth-woven and elf-patterned".' Richard Adams developed a distinctive take on anthropomorphic writing in the 1970s: his debut novel, "Watership Down" (1972), featured rabbits that could talk, with their own distinctive language
Watership Down Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a similar award that authors may not win twice. In 1977 California schoolchildren selected it for the inaugural California Young Reader Medal in the Young Adult category, which annually honours one book from the last four years. In The Big Read, a 2003 survey of the British public, it was voted the forty-second greatest book of all time. The 1993 Puffin Modern Classics edition of the novel contains an afterword by Nicholas Tucker, who wrote that stories such as "Watership Down" "now fit rather uneasily into the modern world of consideration of both sexes". He contrasted