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Lessee now.
On LotR: I first ran across the books (LotR is 6 books, you will probably recall, not a trilogy) in the early 60s, in college. At that point, they did nothing for me. Fast forward to the early 2000s, when for some reason I don't remember, I picked the books up again. This time around, I read them straight through. Not for the quality of writing, which IMO is second rate, but because I found them to be a good story, about the solipsistic nature of evil, and how it permeates creation at every level as an ongoing temptation. Note that the only person to not be vulnerable to the temptation of the Ring is the one person who is wholly other directed - Sam.
So I think that, putting aside the adventure story, what attracts people to LotR is that they resonate to the moral underpinnings of the story. At least, that's what did it for me.
On Shakespeare: I think that the greatness of his plays lies in his ability to brilliantly deploy the several layers of meaning in a word - the connotations as well as the denotations - coupled with what Samuel Johnson observed: "His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion."
It is no surprise to me that Tolstoy didn't get Shakespeare. Tolstoy was the kind of author that Johnson was referring to when he observed: "In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species."
That is to say, Tolstoy was a writer of trees, while Shakespeare was a writer of forests.
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