Day two: The knight and the lion

3) Laudine's messenger was full of dark imagery and from the very start where we first see her with her black Palfrey. From her initial sighting to even the way that she dismounts we see the oddity and the shear anger that this message carries with it. I cannot speak for people in Yvain's day but I believe that now-a-days we would consider this to be a very rough break-up but also very justified. Yvain married this amazing women and just leave's her for almost two years, that'd be a great honeymoon... if it included Laudine. At first I thought to compare this message to a "Dear John" letter where a soldier recieves news that a wife or girlfriend is leaving them, but Yvain almost deserves what he got. The guy just left her, this isn't so much a "dear john" letter as it is divorce court on late night T.V.
The moments following his being told Laudine's message we see a very broad change in Yvain, you might call the next 20 pages his experience with a bad break-up. I've watched many friends go through bad breakups and I've even had my fair share of them, but I have never seen one as bad as Yvain's. The things that he does is almost a direct parallel to what the women in the previous books have done when a knight or loved one is killed. The book says the reason for this is that the body cannot live without the heart and now that Yvain has lost that part of himself he is basically dead. I understand that in a way the best method for taking this is that he is in mourning for the women he lost, but in the two other books when someone died the mourners where not mourning the killer but the person killed. Therefore, Yvain isn't mourning his lost wife but is instead mourning his own misfortune, the person he cares about is still himself. Further into the book we see this change, however, when Yvain is forced to fight for what is right multiple times and learns the meaning of love (the lion) and of friendship (Lunete).

5) The bad thing about a bad breakup is the hardship that both sides face, I can't think that it could ever have been easy for Laudine to simply tell Yvain to stop calling her his wife. In my personal experience and looking at the love stories that are a constant background of a lot of literature we typically see this to be true. Unfortunately for Lunete the barons find someone to accuse for their lady's misfortune, of course this turns out to be her and they apparently go about and try to burn her alive. In this case I think there are simply a lot of very bad judgment calls, Yvain should never have held his lady in waiting for so long and the barons had no solid support for burning a women alive. We watch as this bad judgment is turned on the barons however when they are burned in the fire meant for Lunete, this says a lot for the past event's because it's the narrator's voice that tells us they were wicked people for accusing Lunete in such a way. We have come to trust the voice in the book's by Chretien and we can see that this event was a scene of long withheld justice simply because he says so.