To me, LOTR is the better of the stories.
I had read Unfinished Tales and The Silmarillion long before CoH was released, so I saw (and still consider) CoH to be mainly an amalgam of stories in the two earlier books. Maybe for that reason, CoH didn't impress me in a major way. That's not to say it's a bad book, it just didn't really add to anything in Túrin's tale as I already perceived it.
LOTR is a much more sweeping tale, and I like the "all or nothing" motif: that the Ring must somehow be destroyed for the West to survive.
By contrast, CoH is more the story of a private vendetta that admittedly has a major place in the First Age history, but lacks the high stakes tension of LOTR.
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Music alone proves the existence of God.
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