Lapine Series #2 'Hrairoo' Print

"Hazel, look... the field... it's covered with blood!" "You pay for it! The food, the warren... but no one must ever ask where anyone was or speak of the wires! The whole place is snared! Everywhere, every day!" "You are closer to death than I." -Fiver (Hrairoo) Fiver is the deuteragonist in Richard Adams' book Watership Down. He seems to be able to sense the future. Initially, he is a resident of the Sandleford Warren, and is the younger and smaller brother of Hazel. His lapine name, "little thousand" (Hrairoo) comes from the fact that he was the smallest rabbit of at least five in his litter, since rabbits cannot count above four. He becomes the mate of Vilthuril, and eventually has a litter with her. His son, Threar, appears to have inherited some form of sixth sense himself. Fiver has mostly been portrayed as a small, runty rabbit with brown fur, often with a differently proportioned body compared to the other rabbits. In the film, Fiver has a head that's bigger on his body, and he also has tufts of fur on the top of his head. He has brown fur with a lighter stomach and brown eyes. In the TV series, Fiver is similar to Hazel in appearance, but smaller, with more muted brown coloured fur, and has grey eyes in series 1 and 2. In series 3, his design is a lot sharper and cleaner, and Fiver has yellow eyes instead. In the miniseries, Fiver is shown to have heterochromia iridium, with his left eye being brown while his right eye is green. He is also small in size. Otherwise, he looks very similar to Hazel in build and in fur colour. Despite how much Fiver berates himself, he is gentle, kind and very loyal. He has a sixth sense to know when danger comes. Even though he saved his family's life with his first vision, he constantly blames himself for it, thinking he is causing all the happenings when he really isn't. Despite being a runt, he proves to be much more mature than most of the other characters in the series, as proved when he stops Bigwig and Hazel from fighting each other, often thinks before he acts and sees no point in these blood-spilling wars, also of the fact that whenever he is snapped at or berated, he never expects an apology, but goes with it. He is very self conscious. Source: Watership Down Wiki "El-ahrairah, your people cannot rule the world, for I will not have it so. All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed." "We all have to meet our match sometime or other." "You can't call your life your own: and in return you have safety, if it's worth having at the price you pay." "They want to be natural, the anti-social little beasts. They just don't realize that everyone's good depends on everyone's cooperation." "There is nothing that cuts you down to size like coming to some strange and marvelous place where no one even stops to notice that you stare about you." "To come to the end of a time of anxiety and fear! To feel the cloud that hung over us lift and disperse—the cloud that dulled the heart and made happiness no more than a memory! This at least is one joy that must have been known by almost every living creature." -Richard Adams (Watership Down) Watership Down is an adventure novel by English author Richard Adams, published by Rex Collings Ltd of London in 1972. Set in southern England, around Hampshire, the story features a small group of rabbits. Although they live in their natural wild environment, with burrows, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel follows the rabbits as they escape the destruction of their warren and seek a place to establish a new home (the hill of Watership Down), encountering perils and temptations along the way. Watership Down was Richard Adams' debut novel. It was rejected by several publishers before Collings accepted the manuscript; the published book then won the annual Carnegie Medal (UK), annual Guardian Prize (UK), and other book awards. The novel was adapted into an animated feature film in 1978 and, from 1999 to 2001, an animated children's television series. In 2018, a dramaof the story was made, which both aired in the UK and was made available on Netflix. Adams completed a sequel almost 25 years later, in 1996, Tales from Watership Down, constructed as a collection of 19 short stories about El-ahrairah and the rabbits of the Watership Down warren. The story began as tales that Richard Adams told his young daughters Juliet and Rosamund during long car journeys. As he explained in 2007, he "began telling the story of the rabbits ... improvised off the top of [his] head, as [they] were driving along", but it is possible he may have been inspired by Walter de la Mare's poem "As I Was Walking", as Adams quotes a line from it before the dedication. The daughters insisted he write it down—"they were very, very persistent". After some delay he began writing in the evenings and completed it 18 months later. The book is dedicated to the two girls. Adams's descriptions of wild rabbit behaviour were based on The Private Life of the Rabbit (1964), by British naturalist Ronald Lockley. The two later became friends, embarking on an Antarctic tour that became the subject of a co-authored book, Voyage Through the Antarctic (A. Lane, 1982). Watership Down was rejected seven times before it was accepted by Rex Collings. The one-man London publisher Collings wrote to an associate, "I've just taken on a novel about rabbits, one of them with extra-sensory perception. Do you think I'm mad?" The associate did call it "a mad risk," in her obituary of Collings, to accept "a book as bizarre by an unknown writer which had been turned down by the major London publishers; but," she continued, "it was also dazzlingly brave and intuitive." Collings had little capital and could not pay an advance but "he got a review copy onto every desk in London that mattered." Adams wrote that it was Collings who gave Watership Down its title. There was a second edition in 1973. Macmillan USA, then a media giant, published the first U.S. edition in 1974 and a Dutch edition was also published that year by Het Spectrum. According to WorldCat, participating libraries hold copies in 18 languages of translation. Lapine is a fictional language created by author Richard Adams for his 1972 novel Watership Down, where it is spoken by 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 fragments of language presented by Adams consist of a few dozen distinct words, and are chiefly used for the naming of rabbits, their mythological characters, and objects in their world. The name "Lapine" comes from the French word for rabbit, lapin, and can also be used to describe rabbit society. The words of the Lapine language were developed by Adams piecemeal and organically as required by the circumstances of the plot. In a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" interview, Adams noted that "I just constructed Lapine as I went - when the rabbits needed a word for something so did I." Reflecting on his inspirations for the words, Adams stated that "some of them are onomatopoeic like hrududu (motor vehicle), but overall they simply came from my subconscious". Adams commented that the motivation for the sound of Lapine was that it should sound "wuffy, fluffy" as in the word "Efrafa". Writing for The Guardian, Keren Levy described the Lapine language as "somehow easy to accept as [a language] we have always known. It is the language of the countryside, of its copses and beeches and of the weather." The sound of Lapine has been ascribed to influence from Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Arabic languages. Author Stephen Cain bolsters the Arabic connection by noting in particular that "Adams had occasion to study [Arabic] during his military service in the Middle East." The Lapine language has also been frequently compared to Sindarin (the language of the Elves in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth series) in terms of its effect on setting in the novels. Following the success of Watership Down, Richard Adams would go on to invent another constructed language for his Beklan novels, Shardik (1974) and Maia (1984). Some fans of the book, including authors and academics, have written about the words and phrases extant in the corpus of Watership Down and have analyzed the language and its variations on a linguistic level. Within the books, the rabbits' use of Lapine is presented to readers as Standard English with the inclusion of a number of specialized Lapine lexical terms. Albert Valdman notes that inter-rabbit Lapine is alternately formal and colloquial "marked by hesitations, interruptions, interjections, incomplete sentences, and false starts". Pit Corder breaks this down further, finding that the Lapine spoken by the rabbits consists of 64% simple sentences, 14% compound sentences (with 30% paratactic and 70% marked coordination), and 22% complex sentences. The mean Lapine sentence length is 6.3 words. Adams includes a glossary of all Lapine words in the book at the end. Notable traits include the plural marker -il (which replaces a final vowel if it is present in the singular: hrududu, "automobile", pl. hrududil), and the fact that cardinal numbers only go up to four, with any number above that being called hrair, "many", although the runt Hrairoo's name is translated into English as "Fiver" instead. The use of Lapine words is often (although not exclusively) used to indicate concepts unique to rabbits, such as silflay (aboveground grazing) or tharn (tonic immobility). When speaking to other animals, the rabbits adopt a lingua franca known as "Hedgerow." However, in both examples given in the book (i.e. the mouse and Kehaar the gull) the conversation reverts to Lapine once initial contact has been established. More specifically, the rabbits adopt formal Lapine and the other animals employ a Lapine Foreigner Talk that Corder describes as "a reduced code or incipient pidgin". He further notes that the general rules of "Foreigner Talk" are well-established in societies even among natives who have never communicated with a foreigner. Corder attributes the learning of the rules of "Foreigner Talk" to its use within native-speaker-oriented literature and other media as a proxy for interlanguage. Because Lapine is presented in the novels as Standard English, Lapine Foreigner Talk is essentially English Foreigner Talk with a Lapine gloss and thus provides an example of linguistic enculturation for children who read the books. Breaking down the syntax of Lapine Foreigner Talk to compare with that of standard Lapine, Corder finds that they are roughly the same with the only notable difference being an inversion of the proportion of paratactic to marked coordination in compound sentences. Specifically, Corder reports Lapine Foreigner Talk to consist of 73% simple sentences, 15% compound sentences (70% paratactic and 30% marked coordination), and 12% complex sentences (with 60% complemented by the four verbs "think", "know", "say", and "tell"). Valdman further notes differences between the Lapine Foreigner Talk used to facilitate discussion as with Kehaar the gull, and that used to signal the depreciated status of the unnamed mouse (a less powerful animal in the rabbit world). Richard George Adams (9 May 1920 – 24 December 2016) was an English novelist and writer of the books Watership Down, Shardikand The Plague Dogs. He studied modern history at university before serving in the British Army during World War II. Afterwards, he completed his studies, and then joined the British Civil Service. In 1974, two years after Watership Down was published, Adams became a full-time author. Source: Wikipedia