180 free Folklore trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
47 free folklore trivia questions with answers. This folklore trivia quiz travels the world's folk tales and legends: Slavic witches in chicken-legged huts, Irish fairies who cobble shoes, the giant lumberjack an ad man invented, the steel-driver who raced a machine, the piper who emptied Hamelin, the spider who bought all the stories from the sky god, the foxes of Japan and the horned companion of Saint Nicholas. It also covers the scholars, from William Thoms coining the word to the Grimms and the Aarne-Thompson index. It works for a literature class, a library trivia night, a Halloween party that wants more than horror, or a family quiz where the kids know the tales and the adults know the history. Easy questions for anyone who grew up on fairy tales; harder ones on dates, sources and origins. Every answer was checked against encyclopedic sources before it went live, and each question explains itself as soon as you pick.
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Q 01The word 'folklore' was coined in 1846 by which Englishman?
William Thoms
He proposed it as a good Saxon compound to replace 'popular antiquities'.
Q 02Who expanded Antti Aarne's 1910 folktale classification into the standard European system?
Stith Thompson
The Aarne-Thompson index gives every tale type a number, so Cinderella is ATU 510A wherever it is told.
Q 03Besides verbal, material and customary traditions, folklorists recognise a fourth genre devoted to what?
Children's games and rhymes
Childlore includes playground rhymes, counting-out games and the rules of tag, passed from child to child rather than from adults.
Q 04The Brothers Grimm first published their Children's and Household Tales in which year?
1812
Jacob and Wilhelm, born in Hanau, also began the definitive German dictionary in 1838.
Q 05Which of these tales was NOT popularised by the Grimms' collection?
The Little Mermaid
That one is a literary tale by Hans Christian Andersen; the Grimms gave us Cinderella, Snow White and Hansel and Gretel among others.
Q 06Paul Bunyan is customarily accompanied by which animal?
Babe the Blue Ox
The pair stand as oversized statues in Bemidji, Minnesota, and many other towns.
Q 07Paul Bunyan was popularised by a 1916 promotional pamphlet for which kind of business?
A lumber company
Writer William Laughead did it for the Red River Lumber Company, which is why scholars such as Richard Dorson call Bunyan 'fakelore'.
Q 08Which term did folklorist Dorson apply to invented traditions like Paul Bunyan?
Fakelore
The character did begin in loggers' oral tales, but the version everyone knows was written to sell timber.
Q 09In Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga's forest hut stands on what?
Chicken legs
She travels in a wooden mortar, steering with a pestle, and can be villain or helper depending on the tale.
Q 10Baba Yaga flies through the air in what?
A wooden mortar
She wields the pestle as she goes; Alexander Afanasyev's collections include her in 'Vasilisa the Beautiful' and 'Marya Morevna'.
Q 11What is the leprechaun's principal occupation in Irish folklore?
Making and mending shoes
The solitary fairy is said to grant three wishes in exchange for release if you can catch him.
Q 12Before the 20th century, what colour was the leprechaun generally said to wear?
Red
The green outfit is a modern makeover; the earliest reference to the creature is in the medieval tale Echtra Fergus mac Leti.
Q 13John Henry, the American folk hero, is said to have raced and beaten what?
A steam-powered rock drill
The 'steel-driving man' won but died with his hammer in his hand; the ballad exists in dozens of versions.
Q 21The first clear reference to 'rhymes of Robin Hood' appears in which 1370s poem?
Piers Plowman
By then the outlaw was already familiar enough that a lazy priest in the poem knows his rhymes better than his prayers.
Q 22Robin Hood is traditionally dressed in what colour?
Lincoln green
The cloth took its name from the dyers of Lincoln; his band lives in Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire.
Q 23In the Robin Hood legend, which absent king does Prince John try to usurp?
Richard
The Lionheart was away on crusade and then in captivity, which is why later tellings set Robin in the 1190s.
Q 14The Big Bend Tunnel traditionally linked to John Henry's contest is near Talcott in which state?
West Virginia
The town holds a yearly John Henry festival, though one historian's records place the race 40 miles away at the Lewis Tunnel in Virginia.
Q 15What was Johnny Appleseed's real name?
John Chapman
Born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1774, he was a devoted follower of Emanuel Swedenborg and handed out religious books along with seeds.
Q 16Apples grown from Johnny Appleseed's seeds were mostly good for making what?
Hard cider
Seed-grown apples are unpredictable to eat but fine to press, and the frontier was thirsty.
Q 17According to period accounts, what did Johnny Appleseed wear on his head?
A tin cooking pot
The utensil doubled as his mush pot, and he planted nurseries from Pennsylvania to Ontario.
Q 18The Pied Piper legend is set in Hamelin, a town in which country?
Germany
The traditional date is 26 June 1284, when 130 children followed him out of town.
Q 19How many children is the Pied Piper said to have led away from Hamelin?
130
The Grimms compiled the tale from 11 sources for Deutsche Sagen in 1816, and Robert Browning wrote his poem from a 1605 version.
Q 20What is banned on Hamelin's Bungelosenstrasse, said to be the last place the children were seen?
Music and dancing
The name means 'street without drums'.
Q 24Anansi, the trickster of Akan folklore in Ghana, is most commonly depicted as what animal?
A spider
The name literally means spider, and the tales crossed to the Caribbean with the Atlantic slave trade.
Q 25In the famous tale, Anansi sets out to buy all the stories in the world from which sky god?
Nyame
Ghanaian children still grow up on 'anansesem', spider tales named after him.
Q 26In Japanese folklore, a kitsune is a spirit taking the form of which animal?
A fox
They grow extra tails after living 100 years, up to nine, and are especially fond of impersonating beautiful women.
Q 27In Japan, rain falling from a clear sky is called 'kitsune no yomeiri', meaning what?
The fox's wedding
The kitsune were originally messengers of the rice deity Inari.
Q 28In Irish folklore, what does a banshee's wail foretell?
A death in the family
Her name means 'woman of the fairy mound', and some legends say she can only keen while combing her long hair.
Q 29In Jewish folklore, a golem is a being fashioned from what?
Clay or mud
The most famous, the Golem of Prague, is credited to the 16th-century Rabbi Judah Loew, who used clay from the banks of the Vltava.
Q 30In some golem tales, erasing one letter turns the word 'emet' (truth) into what?
'Met', meaning death
Removing the initial aleph does it; the word golem itself appears once in the Bible, in Psalm 139.