frodos parents
 

Were frodos parents cousins? related in any way i seem to remember hearing something like that somewhere.

Let's see...

Belladonna Took married Bungo Baggins and they had Bilbo.
Mirabella Took (Belladonna's sister) married Gobadoc Brandybuck and had Primula Brandybuck (Drogo's wife, Bilbo's cousin and Frodo's mother).

Are you with me so far?

Drogo was Bilbo's second-cousin on his father's side.
Primula was Bilbo's first cousin on his mother's side.

I think that would make Drogo and Primula second cousins twice-removed. Anyone else care to give it a whirl?

It's a pretty distant relation.... Much healthier than certain European customs of marrying ones first cousin. Yuck!

Well, You should look in "The Peoples of Middle Earth." Or any other tolkien book (I don't know if all of them have it, though) It should have a family tree of "Baggins." Try looking there. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

Oh I gave up on trying to figure out Hobbit family relationships a long time ago as it's a great way to give yourself a headache!!!!

There is somewhere a family tree that says they are second cousins, twice removed or something. I think it's in a certain copy of they RotK.

Burzdol

But its still better than people getting involved with their sister(Gladiator) or as in the south US their moms.

I think that's quite enough cross-continental genealogical comment.

Just looked at the genealogical tables in ROTK, and as far as I can make out (and I might be missing some glaringly obvious point) Drogo and Primula were not technically related directly to each other at all. Both were related to Bilbo, but that's a different matter - for example, if I'm descended from family lines A(mother's family) and B (Father's family) and my maternal cousin is descended from lines A and C(his father's family) HIS cousin (descended from lines C and D) has no blood relation to me even though we have an indirect connection.

On an unrelated note, I'd like to point out that a one-off first-cousin marriage is not a genetic problem in 99% of cases (the 1% being where the common family involved has Tay-Sachs or hemophilia or something like that in their bloodline). It was repeated first-cousin marriages of children who in turn are products of first-cousin marriages that usually did the mischief, and those were usually made only in royal families for the sake of alliances - the old church, in fact, officially condemned marriage between kin closer that *seventh* cousins (obviously a lot of dispensations were handed out). So even if Primula and Drogo were second cousins by blood, the risk to their offspring would have been very minor.

Adding to what Kalimac said, when the common family carries a recessive trait for a gene for a disease like hemophilia, cystic fibrosis, etc., then it is a problem for a descendant of many cousin-cousin unions, because the likelihood that they will inherit both recessive genes increases, with more cousin-cousin unions.


(To make this post on-topic: [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img])

Drogo and Primula wouldn't have had a problem because, to my knowledge, there is no record of any sort of genetic disease among Hobbits. Ergo, they could marry their cousins all they want, with some inherent risks of birth defects and suchlike. Those would be the only thing that they would have to worry about, if the physiology of the Hobbits was generally the same as that of Humans.