The link between place and narrative has been fundamental to our construction of genre in Icelandic saga literature. The sagas’ prevailing geographical attachments have been used as a basis to categorise the Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders), fornaldarsögur (legendary sagas) and riddarasögur (romances or knight's sagas); as Massimiliano Bampi puts it, ‘the temporal and geographical setting of the action plays the foremost role in distinguishing one saga genre from another’. The Íslendingasögur are characterised by their precise locatedness in the Icelandic landscape, their main action ranging across Iceland, Greenland, Scandinavia and the British Isles in the period c. 870–1050. The formal-darsögur and riddarasögur, stories of quest and adventure that sometimes resemble romance, locate their action in landscapes mostly outside the mundane experience of saga audiences. These saga subgenres may sometimes elude classification on structural or thematic gro unds, but are placed according to random ‘accidents of geographic setting’. Generally, the riddarasögur, which include translations of French chansons de geste and Latin histories as well as original Icelandic compositions, traverse a wide world centred on the southern European courts, while the fornaldarsögur situate their main action in a legendary Scandinavia before the Norse discovery of Iceland. These sagas’ broad attachments to southern and northern geographies are among their main generic characteristics, the genre terms conventionally coupled with the geographically contrastive norðrlanda (of northern lands) and suðrlanda (of southern lands). These knots of place and time that localise action are sometimes called chronotopes.

The Icelandic sagas provide insight into a capacious geographical imaginary that draws from the Norse explorations that precipitated Iceland's relatively late discovery, and, as importantly, the Icelanders’ wider engagement with foreign and translated literatures. In earlier scholarship, interest in the geographical awareness that underlies the sagas was sometimes motivated by a modern preoccupation with their value as historical source material. Their geographical coverages were scrutinised in the easy assumption that historical regions described in the northern fornaldarsögur correspond seamlessly with, and can tell us something about the early histories of, their equivalents in modern political geography. The distinction between the historical medieval world and our modern one is further collapsed in the Íslendingasögur.