Pennies crash down from the sky

[sovay]

I did not sleep at all last night. This is much less entertaining than it sounds. I am hoping not to repeat the trick tonight.

I know the last time I read Watership Down (1972) was in seventh grade, two years before I started Latin, but I still have no excuse for realizing only this afternoon that it is completely the Aeneid if someone had listened to Kassandra. The book's first epigraph is even some stichomythia from Agamemnon: φόνον δόμοι πνέουσιν αἱματοσταγῆ (line 1309). Hey, Dawn, how're the wife and kids? Marblehead says hello.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Hey, I have a piece of music from the Rustavi Choir--what are the chances? (Not that piece, though)

Watership Down is an Aeneid retelling... if someone had listened to Kassandra. Oh I see... you mean, if they had gotten out early, not had the whole war.

Interesting!

But tell more?

[sovay]

(Not that piece, though)

It's quite good. The rest of the CD is around here somewhere, but this seems to be the only song on my computer.

But tell more?

Well, for starters assume that Kassandra was a small male rabbit named Fiver . . . It's the escaping of the doomed community before its ruin, not in the midst of—Aeneas only gets out as Troy is already burning—and the search for somewhere to found a new home, with mythically close encounters along the way (Cowslip's warren is explicitly identified by Adams with the Lotos-Eaters of the Odyssey), sort of conflated with the generations-later founding of Rome; papersky points out that the all-male settlers of Watership Down deciding to poach some does from another warren recalls the rape of the Sabine women, while I think I could make a case for the conflict with Efrafa echoing Aeneas' war with Turnus and the Rutuli. I don't believe a point-by-point comparison would hold up. But I should go through and see just how many epic touch-pieces are in the book.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I can definitely see it--Fiver and Kassandra was clear, and the escape before the ruin, and the establishing of a new home somewhere else I can definitely see too. I was wondering if there was some kind of analogue for Efrafa though, and here you've supplied one! The Efrafa part for me just thrusts me totally into a distopic anti-totalitarian space that I don't associate with epics, but you were able to get beyond that :-) (I was terrified of Efrafa as a kid, when I read the book. It was one of those things where I wondered if I could figure out a way to get away, whether I could be brave enough, etc.)

[sovay]

That is lovely....and of course Fiver is Kassandra, so Hazel is Aeneas? Hee.

Your icon is best.

I also love the way the book is used in 'The Stand,' too.

I have not read The Stand. How does the epic get handed on?

[sovay]

(actual line in the show: the character shown goes, "This is a great book! It's about BUNNIES"!).

Hee!

I liked it b/c Stu thinks (being a rural Texan) rabbits are pretty stupid, and he thinks the idea of the book is dumb, but then he starts reading it and is blown away and actually talks about it to people! (he's v closed-mouthed) It's v well-done.

That's awesome.

[sovay]

The thing turned out to be about rabbits, for Christ's sake. The stupidest, most cowardly animals of God's earth....except the guy who wrote that book made them seem different. You really cared about them. It was a pretty damn good story, and Stu, who read at a snail's pace, finished it two days later. ....Tharn. It was a good word for a bad state of mind.

Yay.