Is The Children of Hurin better than the Lord of the Rings?

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by NogrodtheGreat

Doubtless The Lord of the Rings succeeds in questions of detail. By that standard it also beats Cormac McCarthy's the Road (a book similar in many surprising respects to the Children of Hurin), but neither detail nor length make a reading experience worthwhile on their own.

Robert Jordan's fantasy series spans multiple tomes and usually excruciating levels of detail, and yet I find his books far less memorable that the Silmarillion itself, let alone the Lord of the Rings. A tight, compact, exquisitely written work like The Road can leave an impact long after the covers have been shut, and so too, I think, The Children of Hurin.

I quite agree. I haven't read The Road but I have read McCarthy's Child of God and I wholeheartedly agree with you that a book does not have to be long (let alone a series! The Wheel of Time is a horrific offender in this regard, what a bore). Indeed some of my favourite novels (The Great Gatsby, All Quiet on the Western Front, etc) are quite brief. But I was purely comparing The Lord of the Rings to The Children of Húrin, not literature in general. I am not classifying "less detail" as "bad" by any margin. Personally I enjoy that particular level of detail which Professor Tolkien employs in The Lord of the Rings, which when you think about it is comparatively brief compared to most of Tolkien's successors/imitators. I think it is heavily dependent on the author. Personally The Lord of the Rings hits the spot for me, but that's just my judgement.

In this regard I believe it is purely a matter of taste. This is not some kind of attack on The Children of Húrin, which I still like a lot, but I really do not believe that one work of art can be certifiably 'better' than another - I would go mad if I did, for so much popular art (literature, films, etc) I absolutely despise. I would think myself an alien. Indeed, that would mean I was "wrong" for preferring The Lord of the Rings, which doesn't make a great deal of sense in my opinion. I don't believe aesthetic standards are completely arbitrary, but I don't think they're objective either.

Regardless, I have only read The Children of Húrin once, so perhaps it just hasn't had the opportunity to work its magic on me the way The Lord of the Rings has.