Yes, there isn't a lot of point in comparing Howard and Tolkien -- except that, for some of us who aren't so young as we used to be, that's almost an inevitability. Tolkien, Howard, and Lovecraft were all authors whose fiction fascinated me at an impressionable age. (I suppose I began to read Tolkien when I was 11, and Lovecraft and Howard when I was 14.) Coinciding with one's developing self-awareness as regards other areas, one might well compare and contrast them. (Similarly, I remember conversations with a fellow Marvel comics fan aboutthe merits of or lack thereof of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, etc.)
Another reason people of my age might discuss Tolkien and Howard was.... that publishers did that for a while:
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tolkienandfantasy.blogspot.com]
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tolkienandfantasy.blogspot.com]
You seem to have hesitated over the word "prudish" to describe Tolkien's depiction of sexuality. I'd hesitate to use it, too, because it connotes someone whose attitude to sexuality is defective on account of embarrassment or shame. I don't really think that most people reading Tolkien get that impression; I don't think they get the impression that he was ashamed of sexual feelings in himself or others, didn't like to be reminded of sexuality as evident in bodies, was embarrassed by the thought of sexual intercourse.
A reader today might have to make an extra imaginative effort because he would expect Beren and Luthien to go to bed together prior to Beren
winning Luthien by fulfilling her father's demands; but for them to have physically consummated their love on the sly, or in defiance of Luthien's father, would have cheapened themselves and their love and their sexuality. They are noble people, as most of Tolkien's good characters are, and nobility implies living according to a code of ethics that, among other things, prizes sexuality and raises it above the animal level. In our society, you are supposed to grant that people possess personal integrity on whatever terms
they wish; how dare you insinuate (in our society) that a boy lacks integrity if he has sexual relations with half the girls in his high school, or criticize those girls who include him in the stable of their partners? But Tolkien is working with a code, or rather two codes, that would look down on such behavior. The first code is that of Christian ethics. The second is that of chivalry, the aristocratic ideal. The former code regards sexual activity outside the marriage of man and woman as sinful, and the latter regards promiscuity as worthy of thralls and the like -- the people who do the dirty work, who are illiterate, who cannot govern themselves, who don't count. (I'm always struck, in Malory, by the bit in which Lancelot fights his fellow aristocrats with sword and spear, but when a peasant made a grab at him, he killed him by striking him with the back of his hand. You don't use your sword on rabble.) I don't think Tolkien holds this second code except in a very modified form. The hobbits save the world, and they are not aristocrats.
More in a moment.