# What happened to Frodo's Parents?



## esrbl (Mar 29, 2020)

What happened to Frodo's parents? Where does it mention what happened to them?


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## Rivendell_librarian (Mar 29, 2020)

I think Frodo's parents, Drogo and Primula, were both drowned in a boating accident when Frodo was 12. When Frodo was 21 Bilbo invited Frodo to leave Buckland and join him in Hobbiton. Frodo is Bilbo's second cousin once removed. Frodo knew both Merry and Pippin before going to live with Bilbo. Frodo's mother was a Brandybuck.

from Chapter 1 FotR "A Long-expected Party"

_But what about this Frodo that lives with him?’ asked Old Noakes of Bywater. ‘Baggins is his name, but he’s more than half a Brandybuck, they say. It beats me why any Baggins of Hobbiton should go looking for a wife away there in Buckland, where folks are so queer.’

‘And no wonder they’re queer,’ put in Daddy Twofoot (the Gaffer’s next-door neighbour), ‘if they live on the wrong side of the Brandywine River, and right agin the Old Forest. That’s a dark bad place, if half the tales be true.’

‘You’re right, Dad!’ said the Gaffer. ‘Not that the Brandybucks of Buck-land live in the Old Forest; but they’re a queer breed, seemingly. They fool about with boats on that big river - and that isn’t natural. Small wonder that trouble came of it, I say. But be that as it may, Mr. Frodo is as nice a young hobbit as you could wish to meet. Very much like Mr. Bilbo, and in more than looks. After all his father was a Baggins. A decent respectable hobbit was Mr. Drogo Baggins; there was never much to tell of him, till he was *drownded*.’

‘*Drownded?*’ said several voices. They had heard this and other darker rumours before, of course; but hobbits have a passion for family history, and they were ready to hear it again. ‘Well, so they say,’ said the Gaffer. ‘You see: Mr. Drogo, he married poor Miss Primula Brandybuck. She was our Mr. Bilbo’s first cousin on the mother’s side (her mother being the youngest of the Old Took’s daughters); and Mr. Drogo was his second cousin. So Mr. Frodo is his first and second cousin, once removed either way, as the saying is, if you follow me. And Mr. Drogo was staying at Brandy Hall with his father-in-law, old Master Gorbadoc, as he often did after his marriage (him being partial to his vittles, and old Gorbadoc keeping a mighty generous table); and he went out boating on the Brandywine River; and he and his wife were *drownded*, and poor Mr. Frodo only a child and all. ‘

‘I’ve heard they went on the water after dinner in the moonlight,’ said Old Noakes; ‘and it was Drogo’s weight as sunk the boat.’

‘And I heard she pushed him in, and he pulled her in after him,’ said Sandyman, the Hobbiton miller.

‘You shouldn’t listen to all you hear, Sandyman,’ said the Gaffer, who did not much like the miller. ‘There isn’t no call to go talking of pushing and pulling. Boats are quite tricky enough for those that sit still without looking further for the cause of trouble. Anyway: there was this Mr. Frodo left an orphan and stranded, as you might say, among those queer Bucklanders, being brought up anyhow in Brandy Hall. A regular warren, by all accounts. Old Master Gorbadoc never had fewer than a couple of hundred relations in the place. Mr. Bilbo never did a kinder deed than when he brought the lad back to live among decent folk._

That "drownded" makes me think Tolkien is hinting at Dickens' Peggotty in David Copperfield


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Mar 30, 2020)

I've mentioned elsewhere that it fits into the "mysterious birth" trope commonly associated with the romance hero, and often associated with water in some way -- think of Moses and Perseus, for example.

Aragorn fits this pattern too, if more distantly: as the one tasked with "repairing Isildur's fault", he's the hero whose story is "born" in a way, from the Anduin, where his ancestor died, and the Ring was lost.


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## Olorgando (Mar 30, 2020)

Frodo being an orphan is also a popular theme, at least in "classical" (i.e. thought to be "only" fit for children) fairy stories ("Märchen" in German).


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Mar 30, 2020)

Right -- and another thing Dickens exploited to the full.


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## Olorgando (Mar 30, 2020)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> Right -- and another thing Dickens exploited to the full.


And, as I have read somewhere, he had a tendency to give his heroes, or at least some characters, his initials - just got it backwards with "David Copperfield".
But I have not read any of his stuff.


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## Rivendell_librarian (Apr 3, 2020)

This could be a good time to start in on Dickens


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## CirdanLinweilin (Apr 4, 2020)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> Right -- and another thing Dickens exploited to the full.


My High Fantasy character is an orphan, heiress, and also seen as an abomination by many people due to being half one race and half another. Huh.


CL


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## Olorgando (Apr 4, 2020)

CirdanLinweilin said:


> My High Fantasy character is an orphan, heiress, and also seen as an abomination by many people due to being half one race and half another. Huh.
> CL


_Phew!_ Isn't that piling on a bit much for one poor little character to carry around as baggage?


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## CirdanLinweilin (Apr 4, 2020)

Olorgando said:


> _Phew!_ Isn't that piling on a bit much for one poor little character to carry around as baggage?


She can take it. She's a stubborn Crow.


CL


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## Olorgando (Apr 4, 2020)

Ouch! I almost missed the R in that last word in your above comment.
Now *that* would have generated a lively discussion …


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## CirdanLinweilin (Apr 4, 2020)

Olorgando said:


> Ouch! I almost missed the R in that last word in your above comment.
> Now *that* would have generated a lively discussion …


Oh my, I almost *WROTE Cow.


CL*


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Apr 4, 2020)

CL: you should see what some of my posts look like, before I edit them.


On second thought, you shouldn't.


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## Sir Eowyn (Apr 26, 2020)

The miller says he heard that Drogo pushed her in, and she pulled him in after her. The others all dismiss this as a vicious rumour --- and probably it is --- but I always pause at that little bit. It's a sinister little note to strike, at that exact moment. Just feeds in very subtly to that Mysterious Birth thing you mentioned.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Apr 26, 2020)

And the tension increases a bit later, with the Miller's sneering remark about the "outlandish folk" that visit Bilbo:

_'You can say what you like, Gaffer, but Bag End's a queer place, and its folk are queerer.'
. 'And you can say what _you _like, about what you know no more of than you do of boating, Mr. Sandyman,' retorted the Gaffer, disliking the miller even more than usual._

This exchange does at least two things: it foreshadows the little Menippean satire that takes place at the Green Dragon in Chapter 2, and helps explain Ted Sandyman's equally sneering attitude ("like father like son"); it also reinforces the picture of Shire hobbits as somewhat self-centered and provencial - fatuously so, as we learn.

It's interesting that, although the Gaffer is presented as the typical stick-at-home ("Hamfast") _agroikos _character, this conversation hints at something more:

_'If that's being queer, then we could do with a bit more queerness in these parts.' _

Another example of "like father like son", if in wizened form?

And of course, both scenes set up the final confrontation between Sam and Ted in "The Scouring of the Shire", after an eager curiosity has led to growth in one, and scoffing dismissiveness has degraded to moral blindness in the other.

Another -- small -- bit of foreshadowing: compare the Gaffer's words here:

_'There's some not far away that wouldn't offer a pint of beer to a friend, if they lived in a hole with golden walls.' _

to this exchange between Sam and Robin Smallburrow the Shirriff:

_'And what's all this about the inn being closed?'

'They're all closed,' said Robin. 'The Chief doesn't hold with beer. Leastways that is how it started. But now I reckon it's his Men that has it all.'_

Clearly, to hobbits -- and no doubt the author himself -- Denial of Beer is a sure sign of moral turpitude. 

_'_


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## Sir Eowyn (Apr 26, 2020)

Yes, I always found it funny how both the Hobbiton/Bywater area on one side and the Eastfarthing on the other, they regard each other as odd and to be viewed with suspicion. Yet there's a lot of intermarriage between Baggins, say, who embody stolid Westfarthing respectablity, and the Tooks and the Brandybucks, outlandish Easterners. 

Anyway, the Shire has all the virtues and the vices of provincial living. I like that Frodo, half a Brandybuck, lives in Hobbiton as a little bit of an oddity. Lobelia calls him a Brandybuck as an insult --- good moment.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Apr 26, 2020)

Minor point, but the Tooklands were in the Westfarthing.


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## Sir Eowyn (Apr 26, 2020)

So they were... don't know why, I associated them with the Brandybucks. By temperament, I suppose...


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Apr 26, 2020)

Yeah well, I wouldn't worry about it.. A supposed Tolkien "expert" said the same in one of her books -- only she thought Merry and Pippin both came from some place called "Buckville".


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## Sir Eowyn (Apr 26, 2020)

Buckville, that's good... my mother's maiden name's Buck, I guess I come from there too.


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## esrbl (Mar 29, 2020)

What happened to Frodo's parents? Where does it mention what happened to them?


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## Olorgando (Apr 27, 2020)

There is a Sackville in Karen Wynn Fonstad's atlas, in the South Farthing. Keeping descriptive place-name suffixes sorted can be confusing, I guess. There is Buckland, with Brandy Hall. Tookland, but with *Tuck*borough (Fonstad's map has Tuck_*burrow*_!), but then Tookbank. What else: Hardbottle in SF, Nobottle in WF; Longbottom in SF, Willowbottom in EF; Dwaling, Brockenborings, Frogmorton, Whitfurrows, Woodhall and Deephallow in EF; Greenfields, Long Cleeve and Oatbarton in NF; Pincup in SF; Whitwell, Waymeet, Tighfield, Gamwich, Needlehole, Little Delving, Michel Delving, Overhill and Bywater in WF. and pretty much at the center of the Shire, not far from the Three Farthing Stone, and also from the border to the Northfarthing, Hobbiton. Makes it *the* quintessential Hobbit … er, yes, town. Ancestral home of the Baggins. Almost to the Shire what the house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was to 19th-century Europe: they were related by marriage to just about everybody. Queen Victoria's husband and Prince Consort Albert was of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and through their children the spaghetti-plate of European royal interrelations got *really* complicated. Not to Bagginses, Tooks, Brandybucks and the like, piece of cake for them …


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