The article deals with some of the spatial features of women’s storytelling traditions in rural Iceland in the late nineteenth century and early 1900s. The study is based on audiotaped sources collected by folklore collector Hallfreður Örn Eiríksson in the 1960s and 1970s from informants born in rural Iceland in the later part of the nineteenth century. The main focus of the article is on 200 women that figure in these sources and their legend repertoires, although a small sample group of 25 men and their repertoires will also be examined to allow comparison. The article discusses what these sources tell us about women’s mobility and the social spaces they inhabited in the past. It goes on to consider the performance space of the Icelandic turf farm in which women’s storytelling took place from the perspective of gender. After noting how the men and women in the sources incorporated different kinds of spaces into their legends, it takes a closer look at how the spatial components of legends told by the women reflect their living spaces, experiences, and spheres of activity. The article underlines that while women in the Icelandic rural community were largely confined to the domestic space of the farm (something reflected in the legends they told), they were neither socially isolated nor immobile. They also evidently played an important part in oral storytelling in their communities, often acting as the dominant storytellers in the performance space of the old turf farm.

The folk narrative archives, with their large amounts of source material, can provide valuable new insights into the narrative traditions of the past. This also applies to the legend traditions of women in former times and their relationship with women's experiences and social reality. This article examines common features found in the legend repertoires of 200 Icelandic women born in the late nineteenth century, which are kept in the Icelandic sound archives. These features are compared to those observed in the repertoires of a small sample of men found in the same archives; the aim is to establish whether and how the legends told by men and women differ. The key findings are that certain elements clearly differ significantly across gender lines, including preferences for different types of narratives, subjects, and choice of characters, highlighting the very different social realities of men and women in the past.