C. S. Lewis Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free C. S. Lewis trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This C. S. Lewis trivia quiz is about the man rather than the wardrobe: for the books themselves see our Narnia quiz. It starts in Belfast with a solicitor father, a mathematician mother who died when he was nine, the dog whose name he took as his own, the imaginary animal kingdom of Boxen, the English schools he loathed and the tutor he called the Great Knock, then follows him to Oxford, the trenches of the Somme, the shell that wounded him, and the promise to Paddy Moore that shaped the next thirty years. The second half covers the atheist who was 'very angry with God for not existing', the arguments with Tolkien and the late-night walk on Addison's Walk, the Kilns and the child evacuees, the BBC broadcasts that became Mere Christianity, the Inklings, the demon who dedicated his letters to Tolkien, the debate with Elizabeth Anscombe, the CBE he refused, the Cambridge chair, Joy Davidman and the bedside wedding, the pseudonymous book on grief, and the death that shared a day with John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our Narnia and J. R. R. Tolkien quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was C. S. Lewis born in 1898?
Belfast
Belfast. He said the nearby Mourne Mountains, seen in a certain light, made him feel a giant might raise his head over the next ridge, and they helped shape the landscape of Narnia.
Q 02By his stepson's account, why was Lewis known as 'Jack'?
He renamed himself after his dog
He renamed himself after his dog. When Jacksie was killed in an accident, the small boy said he would answer to no other name; no document confirms the dog, and one biographer calls the choice obscure.
Q 03What was the name of the animal-run fantasy world Lewis invented as a boy with his brother Warnie?
Boxen
Boxen. It began as Jack's own Animal-Land, peopled by 'dressed animals' and knights, and took its name when the brothers joined it to Warnie's imaginary India.
Q 04Lewis's mother Flora died in 1908 of what, when he was nine?
Cancer
Cancer. She died on her husband's birthday, and the Shakespeare line on that day's calendar, 'Men must endure their going hence', is now carved on her sons' shared gravestone.
Q 05At which Malvern prep school, 'Chartres' in his autobiography, did Lewis abandon Christianity?
Cherbourg House
Cherbourg House. He was happy there and made his first real friends, yet wrote that he dropped his faith 'with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief'.
Q 06What nickname did Lewis give his private tutor William T. Kirkpatrick?
The Great Knock
The Great Knock. He met the boy's first polite remark about 'wild' Surrey scenery by demanding what he meant by wildness, and went on to drill him in ruthless logic.
Q 07What did the teenage Lewis call the Norse legends that awakened the longing he later named 'joy'?
Northernness
Northernness. It engulfed him at about thirteen when he saw an illustration for Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, and Wagner records soon swallowed his pocket money.
Q 08How did Lewis describe the accents he met on first arriving in England?
'Like the voices of demons'
'Like the voices of demons'. Worse still, he wrote, was the landscape seen from the train, and he conceived 'a hatred for England which took many years to heal'.
Q 09Which Irish poet did Lewis call 'an author exactly after my own heart', meeting him in Oxford in 1921?
W. B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats. Finding his English friends indifferent to the poet, Lewis wrote 'thank the gods that I am Irish' and thought of sending his own verse to a Dublin publisher.
Q 10In which Oxford pub did Lewis, Tolkien and the other Inklings meet to drink and talk?
The Eagle and Child
The Eagle and Child. Regulars called it the Bird and Baby; the group also met in Lewis's college rooms, where chapters of The Lord of the Rings were first read aloud.
Q 11Into which regiment was Lewis commissioned in the First World War?
The Somerset Light Infantry
The Somerset Light Infantry. He reached the trenches on his nineteenth birthday, and later joked that he 'took' some sixty prisoners who simply walked up with their hands raised.
Q 12How was Lewis wounded in April 1918?
By a British shell falling short
By a British shell falling short. He believed the same shell killed the sergeant beside him, yet his memoir shrugs the wound off as 'a sound Blighty from an English shell'.
Q 13What distinction did Lewis earn at Oxford between 1920 and 1923?
A triple first
Q 21Where was Lewis heading, riding with his brother by motorcycle, when he came to believe in Christ?
The zoo
The zoo. 'When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did,' he wrote, yet the ride passed in neither thought nor great emotion, like waking after long sleep.
Q 22Which Narnia book won Lewis the Carnegie Medal, Britain's leading prize for children's books?
The Last Battle
The Last Battle. The prize went to the seventh and final chronicle, and Lewis wrote to his illustrator asking whether it was not really 'our' medal.
Q 23Lewis's wartime BBC radio talks were later collected as which book?
Mere Christianity
A triple first. After top honours in classics and in philosophy he added English in one year instead of the usual three, because classicists were struggling to find posts.
Q 14Lewis cared for Janie Moore for decades because of a wartime pact made with whom?
Her son Paddy
Her son Paddy. The two cadets shared a room in training and are said to have promised to look after each other's family; Paddy was killed in 1918 and Lewis kept his word.
Q 15How did Lewis usually introduce Janie Moore?
As his mother
As his mother. He had lost his own as a boy, and he shared a home with Mrs Moore for nearly thirty years and cared for her as her health failed; whether the bond was ever more than filial is disputed.
Q 16What was the house near Oxford Lewis moved into in 1930 with Warnie and Mrs Moore called?
The Kilns
The Kilns. Built beside an old brickworks, it took in evacuee children during the war, and their arrival gave Lewis the opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Q 17Which Scottish writer's fantasy Phantastes began to turn the teenage Lewis away from atheism?
George MacDonald
George MacDonald. Lewis said his imagination was 'baptised' the night he bought the book at a station bookstall, and he later made MacDonald his guide to Heaven in The Great Divorce.
Q 18Which G. K. Chesterton book helped bring Lewis back to Christianity?
The Everlasting Man
The Everlasting Man. Reading it, Lewis wrote, he 'for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense'.
Q 19Lewis became 'the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England' kneeling in his rooms at which Oxford college?
Magdalen College
Magdalen College. 'You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night,' he wrote; yet that surrender, he stressed, was only to belief in God, not yet to Christianity.
Q 20Lewis's 1931 conversion followed a late-night stroll with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson along what?
Addison's Walk
Addison's Walk. Tolkien argued there far into the night that the old myths had prepared the ground for a story that really happened, and within days Lewis accepted it.
Mere Christianity. He gave the first fifteen-minute talks live in August 1941, and so many listeners wrote in that he went back on air to answer their questions.
Q 24Lewis was president of which university society from 1942 to 1954?
The Oxford Socratic Club
The Oxford Socratic Club. Stella Aldwinckle founded it so that believers and sceptics could argue about religion in the open, and she needed a senior don to sponsor it.
Q 25Which honour did Lewis turn down in December 1951?
A CBE
A CBE. He declined so that critics who saw politics in his religious writing could not point to his name on a government honours list.
Q 26In 1954 Lewis took up a newly founded chair in Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at which university?
Cambridge
Cambridge. He gave his inaugural lecture on his 56th birthday but never really moved: he slept in college during the week and went home to Oxford every weekend and vacation.
Q 27Why did Lewis first marry Joy Davidman, in a register office in April 1956?
So she could continue to live in Britain
So she could continue to live in Britain. Her permit had run out, and the two friends kept the ceremony quiet; it became a marriage in earnest only after she was found to be dying.
Q 28Joy Davidman had been a member of which organisation before her conversion?
The Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA. She joined in 1938 and reviewed films and edited poetry for its magazine New Masses, before Lewis's books helped turn her towards Christianity.
Q 29What made a Church of England wedding difficult for Lewis and Joy Davidman in 1957?
She was divorced
She was divorced. A priest friend, Peter Bide, married them anyway at her hospital bedside and prayed for her recovery, and her illness then went into a remission that gave them three more years.
Q 30Lewis disliked travel, but in 1960 he and Joy took a last holiday together in which country?
Greece
Greece. Knowing her illness had returned, they toured Athens, Mycenae, Rhodes and Crete with friends that April, and Joy died three months later.