Sibylla Bostoniensis

Concord Hymn
("Hymn: Sung at the Completion of the Concord Monument, April 19, 1836")
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
To the tune of "Old Hundredth" (Louis Bourgeois, 1547)

Performed by the Choir of First Parish Church, Concord, Massachusetts. Elizabeth Norton, Director. Uploaded Oct 1, 2013.

I presume I am the only person on Earth whom the whole Elon Musk buying Twitter debacle reminds of the song "A Virgen mui groriosa", Cantiga de Santa Maria number 42, from the 13th century.

A Virgen mui groriosa, reynna espirital, dos que ama é ceosa, ca non quer que façan mal....

The Virgin most glorious, spiritual queen, is jealous of those she loves, for she doesn't want them to sin....

For those of you who don't know, the Cantigas de Santa Maria are a very large, very famous book of songs in high court Gallician-Portuguese compiled in the 13th century by King Alphonso the Wise of Spain, every last one of which – some 400 and change – is about the Virgin Mary. In this book, every tenth song is a generic song in her praise, and every other song tells a story of some miracle attributed to the Virgin.

This corpus of songs is quite popular among musicians today who play medieval music because a lot of them are extremely catchy.

For those of you who don't know, Elon Musk bought Twitter. What happened – and this is the summary which brought the parallel to my attention – is set forth on Reddit by u/Eji1700, who explains what Musk did:

Part 1. Offer to buy twitter at meme stock price because lol.

Part 2. LOOOTS of detail here but short version actually SIGN shit and move forward because "no guyz i can do this"

Part 3. When twitter calls your bluff, even claim you're willing to waive due diligence and can fix all the bot issues. This is important later. Sign a deal that will be litigated in deleware should there be a disagreement and has a specific performance clause.

Part 4. Come out of your K hole/Opium dream/Fucking whatever and realize you never ever intended to buy twitter, especially not at an overvalued meme price. Try to back out because then it would only cost you $1 billion.

Part 5. Welcome to later. You lawyers tell you that you basically cannot back out. You already secured the funding and waived due diligence(your chance to kick the tires and make sure it's not a lemon), and twitter can (and then does) sue for specific performance (fuck you finish the deal).

Part 6. Try to argue that a MAC has occurred. This would have to be a major, specific to the company, unknown event. All of that is very very important. Finding out that twitter makes 10% less than they claimed, is not a MAC. Finding out that twitter has a bot problem, is almost certainly not a MAC, especially back in part 3 when you mentioned you were aware of the bot issues and planning on buying them ON THEIR PLATFORM. The economy falling to the ground around us, is not a MAC.

All of this and more has been litigated to death, in deleware (the uh...i dunno...thunderdome when it comes to mega corps and the like making other's actually follow the rules. They do not fuck around), and to my knowledge MAC's have barely, if ever, been proven.

Part 7. In a SANE deal, it would be at this point that both parties would renegotiate the deal. That would be because the buyer did at one point actually intend to buy, and feels there's something of value there, and the seller obviously would like to unload their company. Since neither of these things really applies (musk sure as shit did not really want to buy twitter and twitter wasn't going around looking for buyers), we are now "off the map" so to speak.

So instead you get your lawyers to try to argue in a way that they know they're going to be laughed at by from their colleges but hey they don't have a fleet of supercars so what do they know anyways, because their client could literally not shut the fuck up for BILLIONS of dollars.

Part 8. Delaware gets tired of this BS and basically plans to skull fuck you. You claim "well ok we want to buy them and we offered it but they're still suing". Court says "fine you've got like...4 weeks. Make it happen or skull fucking". Some side skull fucking in the meantime as the public discovery process means your personal texts start getting dumped on the internet (here: https://muskmessages.com/).

Part 9. Realize you can either buy twitter now at a really fucking stupid price, OR, you can buy twitter in about 6 months tops at a really fucking stupid price + a shitton of lawyer fees + whatever other skull fucking occurs in that time, so you buy twitter.

Part 10. Calm down and rationally managetheohwaitnofuckthatfireEVERYONE.

To summarize the summary, Musk basically said on Twitter that he was going to buy Twitter as a shitpost, and Twitter took him up on it, and as apparently what he thought was theater he signed things and everything, and when he tried to get out of it, because, honestly, he had no real intention (or desire) to do any such thing, and also because it turned out to be a terrible deal where his joking offer was way more than Twitter was worth, Twitter took him to court and the court basically told him, "If you didn't like it, you shouldn't have put a ring on it."

Which is the literal plot of Cantiga de Santa Maria #42: Once upon a time there was a young man whose sweetheart had given him a ring as a token of her affection; one day he came out to play ball with the other youths, and not wanting to damage the ring, he looked around for some place to stow it, and espied a statue of the Virgin Mary. So he went up to the statue and slipped his ring on its finger; further, he made a whole production of it, swearing he no longer had eyes for anyone else, and:

E os gẽollos ficados ant' ela con devoçôn, dizendo “Ave María”, prometeu-lle lógu' entôn que des alí adeante nunca no séu coraçôn outra mollér ben quisésse e que lle fosse leal.

He went down on his knees to her and with devotion, he proclamed: "Ave Maria", ["Hail, Mary"] he promised to her right then that from that time on his heart would love no other woman and that he would be to her faithful.

He's joking, he's clowning around, spoofing plighting one's troth, mocking the ceremony of engagement for the lulz of himself and the other boys.

The statue closes its hand, trapping the ring.

Pois feit' houve sa promessa, o donzél lógo s' ergeu, e a omagen o dedo cono anél encolleu; e el, quando viu aquesto, tan gran pavor lle creceu que diss' a mui grandes vózes: “Ai, Santa María, val!”

Once he made his promise, the youth stood right up and the finger of the statue curled enclosed about the ring; and when he saw what had happened, he became scared and he shouted: "Oh, Saint Mary, help!"

He starts shouting and everyone around comes running, and he explains what happened – and there's the ring, on the statue's finger, and it's not coming off – and everyone is like, "Well, kid, looks like you've sworn yourself to belong to the Virgin Mary. Good luck with that, you should probably report to the order of monks in Claraval [why Claraval I have no idea] to get on with your new Virgin-serving life."

He, of course, does nothing of the sort (the song blames the Devil). He goes home and continues to court and ultimately marry the sweetheart (who apparently doesn't notice the missing ring, and never learns what happens to it – the song doesn't say).

On his wedding night, he has a dream of the Virgin and is she pissed:

[...] en sonnos a Santa María viu, que o chamou mui sannuda: “Ai, méu falss' e mentiral! "De mi por que te partiste e fuste fillar mollér? Mal te nembrou a sortella que me dést'; ond' há mestér que a leixes e te vaas comigo a como quér, se non, daquí adeante haverás coita mortal.”

In sleep, the Blessed Mary he saw, who called to him in anger: "Ay! My false and lying one! "Why did you leave me and take a wife? Did you not remember the ring you gave me; leave her and go with me by any means, if you do not, you will forever be in mortal anguish."

He of course was so freaked out he fled and established a hermitage in the woods and lived out the rest of his life in holy poverty, chastity, and, presumably, misery. The song says at the end that later Mary took him with her "from this world to Paradise", which could mean either that he had served her faithfully at last and was rewarded for it, or that the rest of his miserable life was short. Or both.

(Now there seems to be a subtext here, particularly in the first verse, that the real nature of this miracle is that the Virgin took a bullet for the sweetheart, saving the mortal girl from winding up married to this feckless, faithless cad.)


Accompanying illustration of song from the original book, hosted, of course, on Twitter.

Anyway, I imagine that about now Elon sincerely wishes that the Virgin Mary would put him out of his misery, too.

The tune's great. I'm going to be humming it for weeks. Here's a nice performance, though highly abridged – the original is seventeen verses long, and the refrain is to be sung after each (to complete the rhyme). Here's a rather nice singable translation from someone in the SCA with modern score [PDF].

Translations above from Al Cofrin's Medieval Songs and Dances of 11th-14th c. Europe, Vol 1. and random places on the internet, with some editorializing by me.

I'm posting this instead of succumbing to the urge to try to write a filk of this in 13th century high court Gallician-Portuguese telling the story Elon Musk and how he got trapped into marrying Twitter by putting a ring on a statute for the lulz.