I've copped a great deal of flack recently for continuing to forward particular views about The Children of Hurin with respect to the rest of Tolkien's legendarium.
In response, here's an article that really gets at the heart of what I'm saying. It raises similar points to my own, but it explains them in different terms and tends to go even further than I was willing to.
This part is particularly interesting:
When Tolkien is at his best, as he is in Children of Húrin and in parts of The Silmarillion, the fate of men (or elves, or dwarves) remains external from them, but this certainly isn’t the case in The Lord of the Rings, where moral agency shifts onto the individual, making him responsible when measuring himself against an external moral system, in this case Tolkien’s often maligned good and evil. Perhaps the genesis of that problem can be seen in Children of Húrin, in which a reader with some experience with philology wonders why such a cruel fate, usually the whim of fickle gods, can befall Túrin Turambar when Eru Ilúvatar is a benevolent creator.
In his discussion of "slave morality" vs. "noble morality" (please read the piece in order to learn what these terms refer to) I was particularly struck by this passage:
One could also accuse this worldview of what Nietzsche refers to as Amor fati, the love of fate, in which the individual comes to accept the suffering and loss he or she experiences as necessary. Where Túrin railed against his fate, Frodo, Aragon and co. seem to fall in line under some form of deontology, the journey to Mount Doom will be long and hard, but it has to be done and that is that.
On Moral Fantasy Fiction