Better boring than confusing, I say.
The Fellowship of the Ring (or indeed, the first "book") was written as a sequel to The Hobbit. You have to admit though, that the plotlines are completely unrelated, and the connection between the books is tenuously thin. In "The Hobbit", the magic ring is not a thing of power, evil, or anything of that sort--it's just a trinket. For Tolkien to make this a true sequel and morph this non-central aspect of "The Hobbit" (a ring of invisibility) into the central theme of his great epic (the One Ring of the Dark Lord), Tolkien quite frankly had a lot of explaining to do. To both establish this link to "The Hobbit" and to develop the hobbits and their background, the first chapter is, if nothing else, very necessary.
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