Druids
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49 free Druids trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Almost everything anyone knows about the druids comes from people who were not druids. The Iron Age priests of Gaul and Britain wrote nothing down, so the record is Caesar, Pliny, Tacitus and a few Greek geographers, followed centuries later by Irish monks writing sagas and Welsh antiquaries forging manuscripts. That gap between evidence and imagination is what makes the subject such good trivia. These 49 questions move through the whole story. The classical tier covers Caesar's twenty-year training, the yearly assembly among the Carnutes, Pliny's mistletoe rite, the Roman assault on Anglesey and the emperors who banned the religion. The medieval tier visits Cathbad, Mug Ruith and the druidesses of the Fenian Cycle. The modern tier tracks how John Aubrey and William Stukeley tied druids to Stonehenge, how Iolo Morganwg invented the Gorsedd on Primrose Hill, and how orders from the Ancient Order of Druids to OBOD and the Reformed Druids of North America built today's movement. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, and each explanation adds one more detail. Play it solo, or print it for a pub quiz round.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Celtic compound behind the word "druid" is traditionally read as meaning what?
Oak-knower
Oak-knower is the traditional reading, though some linguists prefer 'strong seer'. Pliny had already guessed in the 1st century that the priests took their name from the tree.
Q 02Which druid brews the magic potion that gives Asterix's village its superhuman strength?
Getafix
Getafix refuses the potion to Obelix, who fell into the cauldron as a baby and has been permanently strong ever since. In the original French the druid is called Panoramix.
Q 03In Pliny's famous account, a druid climbs a tree and cuts mistletoe with what?
A golden sickle
A golden sickle, and the cut mistletoe was caught by others in a cloak. This one passage largely shaped the popular image of the druid.
Q 04Caesar said the druids met yearly in the land of which Gaulish people, whose name survives in Chartres?
Carnutes
Carnutes: Caesar says their land was reckoned the centre of all Gaul, and that people brought their disputes to the druids' yearly gathering there for judgment.
Q 05According to Caesar, druidic teaching was said to have originated where?
Britain
Britain: Caesar added that keen students still travelled there to study the doctrine more closely.
Q 06Caesar said druid pupils were forbidden to do what with their doctrine?
Write it down
Write it down: pupils learned a great body of verse by heart instead. Caesar thought the ban kept the teaching from becoming common property and kept memories sharp.
Q 07Caesar said the druids kept public and private accounts in which alphabet?
Greek
Greek letters probably reached the Gauls through the Greek colony at Marseille. Caesar's men even found a census of the Helvetii written in them in a captured camp.
Q 08Which Roman writer hosted the druid Diviciacus in Rome?
Cicero
Cicero wrote that his guest claimed a knowledge of nature and foretold events by augury. Caesar, who leaned on Diviciacus as an ally in Gaul, never once calls him a druid.
Q 09Diodorus likened the Gauls' belief in souls reborn in new bodies to the teaching of which philosopher?
Pythagoras
Pythagoras: Diodorus wrote that his belief prevailed among the Gauls. Caesar credited the teaching to the druids and said it made warriors brave by removing the fear of death.
Q 10A Roman biographer says which emperor "utterly abolished" the druids' "cruel and inhuman" religion?
Claudius
Claudius went further than Augustus, who had merely barred Roman citizens from taking part in the religion.
Q 11Tacitus describes druids hurling curses at Roman troops as they landed on which island?
Anglesey
Anglesey, then called Mona: Tacitus says the cursing druids and black-robed women with torches froze the soldiers with fear until their general urged them on.
Q 12Which Roman general led the assault on the druids' island stronghold around AD 60?
Suetonius Paulinus
Suetonius Paulinus garrisoned the island and felled its sacred woods, then had to abandon the conquest when revolt broke out behind him.
Q 13News of whose revolt reached the Romans just after their victory over the druids' island?
Boudica
Boudica: her rising forced the Romans to abandon the island, and it stayed outside the Empire until Agricola took it nearly two decades later.
Q 21Caesar named two honoured classes in Gaul: the druids and which other?
Equites
Equites, the knights: everyone else, Caesar claimed, was treated almost as a slave and never consulted, and many bound themselves to nobles to escape debt.
Q 22Christian scribes made the druid Mug Ruith a pupil of which New Testament figure?
Simon Magus
Simon Magus, the sorcerer of Acts: in the tales he teaches Mug Ruith magic and helps him build a flying machine called the 'rowing wheel'.
Q 23The druidess Bodhmall secretly raised which Irish hero?
Fionn mac Cumhaill
Fionn mac Cumhaill was hidden because his father's killers were hunting him. Bodhmall, his aunt, and the warrior woman Liath Luachra taught him to fight and hunt in the woods of Sliabh Bladma.
Q 14Lucan named three Gaulish gods appeased with blood: Teutates, Esus and which thunder god?
Taranis
Taranis: later commentators on Lucan say his victims were burned, while those of Esus were hung from trees.
Q 15Caesar reported that victims were burned inside a huge image made of what?
Wicker
Wicker: Caesar describes huge figures with limbs woven from twigs, filled with living men and set alight. Criminals were the preferred victims, he says, but the innocent were used when they ran short.
Q 16Stonehenge frames the sunrise on which day, when modern Druids hold their best-known ceremony there?
The summer solstice
The summer solstice: after police clashed with travellers nearby in 1985, access to the stones for the midsummer sunrise was barred for almost fifteen years.
Q 17Which animals were sacrificed after the mistletoe was cut in Pliny's rite?
Two white bulls
Two white bulls, their horns bound for the first time, were killed after the cutting. The Gauls believed mistletoe taken in drink would make any barren animal fertile, Pliny adds.
Q 18Pliny's account of the druids' mistletoe rite records a Gaulish word meaning what?
All-healer
All-healer: it is often taken as the Gauls' name for mistletoe itself, but the standard English translations of Pliny apply the word to the moon instead.
Q 19The Coligny calendar, linked to druidic astronomy, is displayed in which French city?
Lyon
Lyon: the calendar was dug up in 1897 at Coligny, to the north-east, in fragments beside a broken bronze statue of a god.
Q 20Caesar said the Gauls reckoned time by what, rather than by days?
Nights
Nights: Caesar ties the custom to the Gauls' claim, taught by the druids, that they all descended from Dis, god of the underworld, so each new day began at nightfall.
Q 24In the seventh-century Lives by Muirchú and Tírechán, druids are the pagan sorcerers who oppose which saint?
Patrick
Patrick: these Lives, written long after his death, show a martial saint who contests with druids, overthrows idols and curses kings.
Q 25In early Irish law, the druid's social role was largely taken over by which figure?
The poet (fili)
The poet (fili) inherited the druid's standing as Christianity spread, while the druid himself sank in the law texts to a mere sorcerer.
Q 26The Welsh word dryw can mean 'seer' and also which bird?
Wren
Wren: early Irish texts likewise call it the druid bird, one that makes prophecies, and wren boys long hunted it each St Stephen's Day as the king of all birds.
Q 27Which 17th-century antiquary first credited the druids with building Stonehenge and Avebury?
John Aubrey
John Aubrey filed both monuments under 'Templa Druidum', temples of the druids, in a survey he worked on for some thirty years. William Stukeley later made the idea popular.
Q 28Which deist portrayed the druids as a domineering priesthood ruling through credulity?
John Toland
John Toland's hostile picture drew an answer from the clergyman William Stukeley, who set out to combat deism by recasting the druids as near-Christian patriarchs.
Q 29Iolo Morganwg, founder of the Gorsedd of Bards, was exposed after his death as a prolific what?
Forger
Forger: a Glamorgan stonemason by trade, he slipped poems and triads of his own into editions of medieval Welsh literature, and the fakes were only untangled in the 20th century.
Q 30Iolo Morganwg held his first Gorsedd ceremony in 1792 at which London location?
Primrose Hill
Primrose Hill: the Welsh bardic revival began in exile, among London's Welsh societies, and a plaque unveiled on the hill in 2009 marks Iolo's ceremony.