Folklore Trivia
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176 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.
30 of 176 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who coined the word 'folklore' in 1846?
William Thoms
William Thoms coined 'Folk-Lore' in an 1846 letter to The Athenaeum, proposing 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
The first volume of the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen appeared in 1812, a second followed in 1815, and the brothers revised the collection through seven editions ending in 1857.
Q 05Which of these tales was NOT popularised by the Grimms' collection?
The Little Mermaid
The Little Mermaid is a literary tale by Hans Christian Andersen, published in 1837; the other three all appear in the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen.
Q 06Paul Bunyan is customarily accompanied by which animal?
Babe the Blue Ox
Babe the Blue Ox is Paul Bunyan's giant companion; the pair stand as oversized statues beside Lake Bemidji in Minnesota and in many other towns.
Q 07Paul Bunyan was popularised by a 1916 promotional pamphlet for which kind of business?
A lumber company
William Laughead, an advertising man for a Minnesota lumber company, wrote the pamphlet, turning loggers' oral tales into the firm's advertising mascot.
Q 08Which term did folklorist Dorson apply to invented traditions like Paul Bunyan?
Fakelore
Dorson coined 'fakelore' in 1950 for manufactured traditions passed off as genuine folk tradition; Bunyan's tales began among loggers but were rewritten as advertising copy.
Q 09In Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga's forest hut stands on what?
Chicken legs
Baba Yaga's hut stands on chicken legs and turns to face whoever commands it; she can be villain or helper depending on the tale.
Q 10Baba Yaga flies through the air in what?
A wooden mortar
Baba Yaga rides in a wooden mortar, propelling it with the pestle and sweeping away her tracks with a broom, as Afanasyev's 'Vasilisa the Beautiful' describes.
Q 11What is the leprechaun's principal occupation in Irish folklore?
Making and mending shoes
The leprechaun is a solitary fairy cobbler, forever making and mending shoes; the tapping of his hammer is said to give away his hiding place.
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
John Henry beat the steam-powered rock drill through the rock but died with his hammer in his hand, a contest told in dozens of ballad versions.
Q 21The first clear reference to 'rhymes of Robin Hood' appears in which 1370s poem?
Piers Plowman
William Langland's Piers Plowman (B-text, c. 1377) has Sloth, a lazy priest, confess he knows 'rymes of Robyn Hood' better than his Paternoster.
Q 22Robin Hood is traditionally dressed in what colour?
Lincoln green
Lincoln green, a cloth dyed by the woad-and-weld dyers of Lincoln, is the outlaws' traditional colour in the ballads, where the band hides in Sherwood Forest.
Q 23In the Robin Hood legend, which absent king does Prince John try to usurp?
Richard
Richard the Lionheart was away on crusade and then held captive abroad from 1192 to 1194, 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
Big Bend Tunnel lies at Talcott in West Virginia's Summers County, though historian Scott Nelson argues the race actually took place at Virginia's Lewis Tunnel.
Q 15What was Johnny Appleseed's real name?
John Chapman
John Chapman, born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1774, was a devoted Swedenborgian who handed out religious tracts along with his apple seeds.
Q 16Apples grown from Johnny Appleseed's seeds were mostly good for making what?
Hard cider
Hard cider: apples grown from seed vary wildly and are rarely good eating, but they press well, and cider was the frontier's everyday drink.
Q 17According to period accounts, what did Johnny Appleseed wear on his head?
A tin cooking pot
He wore a tin cooking pot, which doubled as his mush pot, while planting apple nurseries across Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.
Q 18The Pied Piper legend is set in Hamelin, a town in which country?
Germany
Hamelin lies on the Weser in Lower Saxony, Germany; the traditional date of the children's disappearance is 26 June 1284.
Q 19How many children is the Pied Piper said to have led away from Hamelin?
130
The earliest accounts say 130 children were led away on 26 June 1284; the Grimms compiled the tale from eleven earlier accounts for Deutsche Sagen in 1816.
Q 20What is banned on Hamelin's Bungelosenstrasse, said to be the last place the children were seen?
Music and dancing
Music and dancing are forbidden on the Bungelosenstrasse, the 'street without drums', because the children were last seen there.
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
Nyame, the Akan sky god, set the price of the stories at four creatures, including Onini the python and Mmoboro the hornets, which Anansi captured by trickery.
Q 26In Japanese folklore, a kitsune is a spirit taking the form of which animal?
A fox
A kitsune is a fox spirit; in the tales it grows extra tails as it ages and delights in taking the form of a beautiful woman.
Q 27In Japan, rain falling from a clear sky is called 'kitsune no yomeiri', meaning what?
The fox's wedding
'Kitsune no yomeiri' means 'the fox's wedding'; a sunshower was taken as the sign of foxes holding a wedding procession unseen by humans.
Q 28In Irish folklore, what does a banshee's wail foretell?
A death in the family
The banshee's keening foretells a death in the family; her name, bean sídhe, means 'woman of the fairy mound'.
Q 29In Jewish folklore, a golem is a being fashioned from what?
Clay or mud
A golem is shaped from clay or mud; the most famous, the Golem of Prague, was said to be moulded from clay taken from the banks of the Vltava.
Q 30In some golem tales, erasing one letter from the word on its forehead leaves what?
'Met', meaning death
Erasing the initial aleph from emet (truth) leaves 'met', meaning death, which deactivates the golem; the word golem itself appears once in the Bible, in Psalm 139.