From John Garth's review of Children of Hurin in The Sunday Telegraph:
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But The Children of Hurin is no academic excercise, partly because it also breathes the dank air of the 20th Century, with its muddied motives, its opression & slaughter. Cruelty & brutality are explicit. Bitterness ousts charity & hope. this is far from the black-&-white moral landscape that critics too often decry in Tolkien's works. The enchanted world is being killed by a thousand cuts; the rivers are poisi=oned & their divine spirit sent into retreat. As befits a story by a Somme veteran, over-confidence leads to the disastrous Battle of Unnumbered Tears. For survivors, the consequences of heroism are worse. The chieftan Hurin is captured by the forces of the Satnic Morgoth, who forces him to watch with superhuman vision as a curse inexorably pursues his distant family; & particularly his heir, Turin.
As a boy, Turin poses immense questions of fate & death, but no-one in this benighted world knows the answers. If The Lord of the Rings is an expression of faith in a God who turns events to good, The Children of Hurin expresses a visceral sense of evil undermining everything of worth. Evil, here, delights in irony. ...
In what is now effectively Tolkien's last Middle-earth work, I think we hear the authentic voice of the war veteran, entirely open-eyed about the horrors of the human condition but a staunch dissident against the view that endevour is futile.
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Now, LotR, & to an extent TH, end in hope of a kind (as Garth points out in the bolded section above). CoH ends in despair. In LotR & TH we have a constant sense that there as 'forces' of good behind events, guiding the protagonists towards ultimate victory. In CoH we have none of that. The Valar, & Eru himself, may as well not exist. Morgoth is the ultimate 'divine' power & does basically what he wants. What 'echoes' throughout CoH is not the compassionate guidance of Eru, but the mocking laughter of Morgoth.
Greg Wright, in his book 'Tolkien in Perspective', suggested that the Athrabeth should be appended to all editions of LotR in order to emphasis the 'Christianity' of the work. This makes me wonder.
Should LotR be 'appended' to CoH, to emphasise the underlying 'hope' of Tolkien's work? CoH as a stand alone work, is bleak, hopeless & ends in despair. Anyone who didn't know LotR & CoH were by the same person would hardly guess that to be the case. Yet CoH is the work that Tolkien put the greatest amount of time & effort into in his later years. It was the one (even above Beren & Luthien & The Fall of Gondolin) that he desired to bring to completion.
Is Garth right? Is this work a reflection of Tolkien the Somme veteran, while LotR, it could be argued, is the work of Tolkien the Catholic? LotR presents the orthodox Catholic view, that God is watching over us all, & that while there may be suffering & loss, in the end God will bring good out of evil, & that, in the end, 'All shall be well, & all shall be well, & all manner of thing shall be well'. CoH seems to present a vision of a world where God won't - where he doesn't actually care enough to bother.
So, what do we make of this situation of CoH being Tolkien's 'final' work on Middle-earth? This is the latest vision we have of Tolkien's world, dark, unremitingly bleak & ending in despair & hopelessness.
Yet, it is also (& perhaps fittingly) the finest manifestation of the Northern theory of courage - to fight on without hope in a light at the end of the tunnel - because it ain't a 'tunnel': its a hole -in fact its a grave. One fights on not in hope of victory, or the defeat of the enemy, but simply because fighting an evil enemy is the right thing to do. As Turin argues:
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For victory is victory, nor is its worth only from what follows it....The defiance of Hurin Thalion is a great deed; & though Morgoth slay the doer he cannot make the deed not to have been. ...& is it not written into the history of Arda, which neither Morgoth nor Manwe can unwrite?'
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LotR ends in Eucatastrope, CoH in dyscatastrophe. Yet, by chance ("If chance you call it"), the last published work of Tolkien's on Middle-earth reflects not Christian faith, but heroic Northern courage in the face of hopelessness. I think Garth is right, too, that only a Somme veteran could have written CoH.
At the very least we now have a counterpoint to the 'Christian hope' of LotR: the Pagan
courage in the face of 'hopelessness' of CoH. Others have pointed up Tolkien's inspiration in Sigurd & Kullervo. But Beowulf is there at the heart of CoH. Turin is a Northern hero, moreso than any other character Tolkien created.