The Greenlanders continues the Scandinavian epic saga. Smiley is well acquainted with this tradition through her doctoral research in Iceland. Many passages in The Greenlanders draw upon fourteenth- and fifteenth-century ac counts. Like Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil (1917), Smiley's novel shows a hardy people's struggle to gain a livelihood from unpromising circumstances.

Unlike previous and later generations of Scandinavians, the Greenlanders lacked the means to flee westward from their harsh situation to Vinland and the more hospitable climate of North America, or even to return to the barren shores their ancestors had departed. Yet in many ways they resemble characters depicted in Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1867) or Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth (1927).