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

[Galadriel]

Originally Posted by TheLostPilgrim

Discuss.
Do you feel The Children of Hurin--or any of the other stories from The Silmarillion--is better than The Lord of the Rings?

I honestly feel like while LOTR is justifiably lauded, most of the stories in The Silmarillion could eat it for breakfast if they had been turned into full length conventional narratives.

That depends, I guess, on how you define 'better'. I don't think that 'darker' is necessarily 'better', though TS has characters that often are more complicated, more 'grey', if you like, than those in LOTR. I think Tolkien's use of language is better in the latter, and, as a story, the scale is not comparable to Children of Hurin. To me, all of Tolkien's stories set in Middle Earth form one, large tale, and while some are perhaps more tedious or less relevant than others, whether some are 'better' than others is quite debatable.