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I see my mother in my face, but only when I travel
I still have a fever. I had to cancel hanging out with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
no subject
I think it likelier that the remarkable and adventurous Belladonna procreated soon after marrying and decided that one child was enough, rather than marrying early and having fertility problems. So she had her entire youth and the first few years after "coming of age" at 33 for adventures.
The two known Tooks to have had adventures were her siblings: older brother Hildifons (born 1244, eight years before Belladonna) "went off on a journey and never returned," while the youngest of the Old Took's dozen children, Isengar, is "said to have 'gone to sea' in his youth." Since he was born in 1262, his youth ended when Bilbo was 5, so he is clearly the big influence on Bilbo's fascination with the sea.
There's a pretty good unwritten story about Hildifon's disappearance, his relationship to Belladonna and Isengar, and Isengar's sea adventure which presumably happened at precisely the time the staid and respectable Bungo Baggins was courting his older sister. (It is, in fact, precisely the sort of story Allen and Unwin were expecting as part of a series of modest-length sequels to the original book, in the style of the Dr. Doolittle books.)
Incidentally, the youngest remarkable daughter, Mirabella, was Frodo's grandmother; she married Gorbadoc 'Broadbelt' Brandybuck (Master of Buckland and Merry's great-grand-father) and their daughter Primula, who was 21 at the time of The Hobbit, later married Bilbo's second cousin Drogo.
(The relationships among the hobbit characters are wonderfully complicated, due to the frequent marriages among the Tooks, Brandybucks, Baggins, and Bolgers and amplified by the fact that Merry's parents, Saradoc Brandybuck and Esmeralda Took, were second cousins. Saradoc was Frodo's first cousin (being the son of Frodo's maternal uncle Rorimac) and Esmeralda was Frodo's second cousin, being the granddaughter of Hildigrim Took, one of Belladonna and Mirabella's older brothers. But wait, there's more! Hildigrim's wife was Rosa Baggins, who, like Frodo's grandfather Fosco, was Bungo Baggin's first cousin. So Esmeralda was also Frodo's third cousin, on the Baggins side. But we're not done yet, because, Frodo's grandmother (Fosco's wife), Ruby Bolger, was Gorbadoc Brandybuck's first cousin, his father Marmadoc having married Adaldrida Bolger. So Saradoc was also Frodo's third cousin via the Bolgers. So Merry was Frodo's first, second, third, and third cousin, all of them once removed.)
no subject
Thank you for all this, especially the last paragraph. It reminds me of sitting in the bar of the Green Dragon on a rainy evening with my feet on the fender.
no subject
I love the little bit in the LOTR movie where Pippin is explaining his relationship to Frodo to random strangers at The Prancing Pony, because it reads like the filmmakers' own shout-out to their fondness for the geneologies. I didn't realize that Frodo and Merry were related a fourth way (through the Bolgers, whose family tree was cut at the last moment from Appendix C for space reasons and really ought to be restored) until I was rereading Volume XII of The History of Middle-Earth last night, and it makes me very happy. And of course Merry's relationship to Frodo is an expansion on Frodo's to Bilbo (in both cases, both first and second cousins once removed).