Wisdom on Worldbuilding

“The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of old.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth,
before he had made the earth with its fields,
or the first of the dust of the world.
When he established the heavens, I was there;
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master workman,
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the children of man."

-The Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 8

When I read this last week, I was surprised how much it reminded me of something out of Tolkien's Silmarillion. Of course, as as secular Rings fans are always quick to point out, Tolkien "despised allegory", but also in Tolkien's own terms, "We make still by the law in which we're made." Tolkien, like me, you and the secular Lord of the Rings fans live in a God-made world of symbols and they themselves are self-portraits of the Worldbuilder. The connections are necessarily there.