jewelry-based ploy to take over the world in the name of evil
That might be the single greatest description of LOTR I’ve ever seen lmao.
Also don’t forget, if it wasn’t for some old wizard who had an affinity for getting high with little people, no one would’ve saved the world.
Yeah, that’s the biggest tell that The Hobbit wasn’t designed to have the sequels it did. If Tolkien had had The Lord of the Rings in mind when he wrote The Hobbit, Gandalf would have recognized the One Ring when he saw it.
Not necessarily. There were several lower rings out there in the world. The One Ring had been lost since thousands of years. I don’t remember what Saruman tells the wizards about it exactly, but essentially, it is probably lost for ages, and Gandalf trusted his wisdom at the time.
When Gandalf meets Frodo at the start of LOTR, he tells him he was getting increasingly suspicious about this ring, and started doing researchs on it, until there was no doubt anymore that this was the One Ring. Tossing it into the fire is only an ultimate confirmation.