I see my mother in my face, but only when I travel

I still have a fever. I had to cancel hanging out with eredien. Observe me continuing unthrilled. And it's beautiful out, too.

In an effort to distract myself from annoyance and malaise, I am re-reading The Hobbit for the first time since high school or college. It turns out that the hardcover we have downstairs is the first revision from 1951, not the third edition from 1966, meaning that I've never read the author's final preferred text, but I am nonetheless enjoying it very much (and may spam your friendlists with random thoughts on the book, since I'm not sure my brain is good for much else at the moment). I do have, however, one serious complaint:

As I was saying, the mother of this hobbit—of Bilbo Baggins, that is—was the famous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of the hobbits who lived across The Water, the small river that ran at the foot of The Hill. It had been said that long ago one or other of the Took family had married into a fairy family (the less friendly said a goblin family); certainly there was still something not entirely hobbitlike about them, and once in a while members of the Took-clan would go and have adventures.¹ They discreetly disappeared, and the family hushed it up; but the fact remained that the Tooks were not as respectable as the Bagginses, though they were undoubtedly richer.

Not that Belladonna Took ever had any adventures after she became Mrs. Bungo Baggins . . .

With all your Unfinished Tales and Lost Tales and Had Them Here A Moment Ago, Must Have Left Them In My Other Jacket Tales, Mr. Tolkien, could you not have given us some of her adventures from before that point? I have always liked that Bilbo's unconventional, tricksterish streak comes down through his mother's side (as with Odysseus). I like even more that Belladonna had stories in her own right, because you don't pick up either of those adjectives by marrying a man who sounds like the hobbit's answer to the Drones Club. It's confirmed that she knew Gandalf well—"To think that I should have lived to be good-morninged by Belladonna Took's son, as if I was selling buttons at the door!"—and perhaps when Bilbo speaks of the wizard's responsibility for "so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures," who knows but that he's not speaking unwittingly of his own mother? But that's all we ever hear. And this from an author whose supplemental materials include family trees and histories of characters who never rated even a mention in the text itself? In short, Tolkien, I respect the invention of more than fifty thousand years of recorded history: but you could totally have spared some for the Old Took's remarkable daughters. I haven't even a clue what her sisters got up to. And I am not, even with the excuse of a fever, writing fanfic to find out.

1. And here, actually, is one of the sentences Tolkien revised for the edition I've never read, thank you, Google Books: "It was often said (in other families) that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd, but certainly there was still something not entirely hobbitlike about them . . ." I am definitely going to need the correct edition; I have no idea what other small stray changes I've missed. I was going to write that a library is next on my to-do list, but it will probably be simpler just to raid Eric's shelves.