The analyses in the preceding chapters reveal that emotional representation is not only culturally contingent and socially determined, but moreover reflects generic dispositions that one must assume audiences would have recognised and to which they would have responded. Admittedly generic distinctions are to some extent modern categorisations and serve a modern desire for demarcations of the medieval past. Such fixed modern notions may contain and stabilise the shifting concept of the Middle Ages, rather than illuminate medieval perceptions of literary traditions. Nevertheless, the configurations and manipulations of the diverse emotive scripts evident in the literary material discussed in the previous chapters suggest that audiences are likely to have been able to decode the varying representations of emotion accurately. They would therefore have been able to situate them within a political, cultural and, significantly, generic context, thereby providing those codes with signifying potential.

By curtailing and adapting the emotive scripts to suit the socio-cultural or literary conventions of their receiving audiences the translated romances shifted the fundamental tenet of the emotive subtext of their sources. The indigenous romances then reformulated the emotive framework of the courtly romance to encompass the particular cultural concerns of fourteenth-century Icelandic audiences as well as the later reading communities. The emotive literary identity of the courtly romance was refashioned to encompass alternative emotive scripts, aimed, for instance, at hagiographical compassion in Mírmanns saga or featuring burlesque gender politics, as can be seen in Viktors saga ok Blávus. Some of the native Icelandic romances from the fourteenth century, including Sigur ðar saga þogla, in fact show more affinities with the fornaldarsögur (the legendary sagas) than with the romance as a generic form.

The sub-genre of the maiden-king romances, which focuses on female sovereignty and agency, moreover indicates the flexibility of the genre to encompass and contend with social issues, particularly those related to gendered behavioural norms and the presumed threat posed to social stability by any deviations from those norms. The romance as a genre thus provided a platform in late-medieval Iceland for hybridisation, where motifs, themes and styles could be combined, unravelled and re-signified.