Hans Christian Andersen Trivia
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59 free Hans Christian Andersen trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Hans Christian Andersen trivia quiz covers the Danish writer behind The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor's New Clothes and The Snow Queen. The easy questions cover the nationality, the birthplace, the most famous tales, the Copenhagen statue and the Disney films they inspired. From there it moves through a strange, lonely life: the illiterate washerwoman mother, the soprano voice that got him into the Royal Danish Theatre, the school years he called the darkest of his life, the king who paid his fees, the 1835 booklet that started it all, the letter of proposal handed to Jenny Lind at a railway station and the five weeks he spent at Charles Dickens's house. The harder end covers the thirty rigsdalers he was paid for the first tales, the last-minute rewrite of The Emperor's New Clothes, the Riverside Magazine deal, the fall from bed, the funeral music he asked for, the shared Collin grave, the sawn-off heads of the mermaid statue, and the flatworm named after him. Every answer was checked against Andersen's encyclopaedia entry and the pages for individual tales before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our fairy tales and Disney quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Danish city was Hans Christian Andersen born in 1805?
Odense
Odense. When he left as a boy, a fortune-teller told his mother the town would one day be lit up in his honour; in 1867 it was, with a torchlight procession for its new honorary citizen.
Q 02Which famous fairy tale did Andersen write?
'The Little Match Girl'
'The Little Match Girl' is one of the 156 tales Andersen published. Its barefoot heroine burns her whole bundle of matches on New Year's Eve to hold on to a vision of her dead grandmother.
Q 03What was the occupation of Andersen's mother, Anne Marie Andersdatter?
Washerwoman
Washerwoman. After his father died she went out washing to keep them both, and she ended her days in an almshouse in 1833; Andersen, abroad on his first grand tour, heard the news only weeks later.
Q 04In Andersen's 'The Wild Swans', which plant must Elisa knit into shirts to turn her swan brothers human again?
Nettles
Nettles, picked barehanded in graveyards, blister her hands, and she may not speak a word until the shirts are done. She runs out of time, so her youngest brother keeps a swan's wing in place of one arm.
Q 05In Andersen's 'The Little Mermaid', what does every step on her new legs feel like?
Treading on sharp knives
Treading on sharp knives is the price the sea witch names, on top of the mermaid's voice. She dances for the prince all the same, and he marries another princess.
Q 06At 14, Andersen left home for Copenhagen hoping to win fame as what?
An actor
An actor was the plan. His boy-soprano voice got him into the Royal Theatre, but it soon broke, and after three years of failed tries on stage a director sent him to school instead.
Q 07In one Andersen tale, a one-legged toy soldier falls in love with which other toy?
A paper ballerina
A paper ballerina, balanced on one toe, looks to him as if she has only one leg too, so he decides she is the match for him. Both end in the stove, where he melts into a little tin heart.
Q 08In one Andersen tale, the emperor of which country prefers a jewelled mechanical bird to a living one?
China
China's emperor banishes the living bird for a jewelled wind-up one sent from Japan. When the toy has broken down and he lies dying, the real bird comes back and sings him well.
Q 09Andersen's first book appeared under the pen name Villiam Christian Walter, honouring himself, Walter Scott and which writer?
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare. Andersen was 17, and the book, a play and a ghost story that leaned heavily on other writers, sold so badly that most of the edition was pulped.
Q 10In Andersen's 'The Emperor's New Clothes', the two swindlers who fool the court pose as what?
Weavers
Weavers, they say, of a cloth invisible to anyone unfit for his office or hopelessly stupid. They pocket the silk and gold thread and work the empty looms late into the night.
Q 11Andersen's first novel, The Improvisatore (1835), was inspired by his travels in which country?
Italy
Italy. The novel came out a month before his first fairy tales and was an immediate success, so for years readers knew Andersen as a novelist rather than a teller of tales.
Q 12In which Andersen tale does a soldier win a princess with the help of three dogs with enormous eyes?
'The Tinderbox'
'The Tinderbox': each strike of it calls a dog, the biggest with eyes the size of Copenhagen's Round Tower. At the gallows they toss the judges and the king into the air, and the soldier gets the princess.
Q 13Which famous German had never heard of Andersen when the Dane called on him unannounced in 1844?
Jacob Grimm
Q 21In Andersen's 'The Little Mermaid', what do her sisters trade to the sea witch for a dagger to save her?
Their hair
Their hair buys a dagger: if she kills the sleeping prince before sunrise, she can be a mermaid again. She looks at him, flings it into the waves and leaps after it.
Q 22Which Copenhagen waterfront, now lined with restaurants, was Andersen's home at three different addresses?
Nyhavn
Nyhavn. He wrote his first fairy tales in rented rooms at No. 20, and in all his decades in Copenhagen he never owned a home, only lodging with landladies or living in hotels.
Q 23Which English novelist stopped answering Andersen's letters after the Dane stretched a two-week visit into five?
Charles Dickens
Jacob Grimm asked who he was and what he had written, Andersen recalled, and the embarrassed Dane fled without meeting Wilhelm. A year and a half later he was meeting both brothers in Berlin and talking fairy tales with them.
Q 14In Andersen's 'The Fir-Tree', what becomes of the tree after its one glorious Christmas Eve?
Chopped up and burned
Chopped up and burned, after months forgotten in an attic with only mice to hear its stories. All its life the tree had longed for something grander to come, and it never noticed when it was happy.
Q 15In Andersen's 'Thumbelina', which bird does the tiny heroine nurse back to life in a mole's tunnel?
A swallow
A swallow, left for dead underground, is warmed through the winter by Thumbelina. It comes back just before her wedding to the mole and carries her south, where she marries a tiny winged king her own size.
Q 16Which German Romantic novella about a water spirit influenced 'The Little Mermaid'?
Fouqué's Undine
Fouqué's Undine is a water spirit who wins a soul by marrying a knight. Andersen's mermaid loses her prince, yet she is still offered the chance to earn a soul by her own good deeds.
Q 17In 'The Emperor's New Clothes', who first says the emperor has nothing on?
A child
A child says it, and the crowd takes up the cry. In the Spanish tale Andersen borrowed, a stable hand spoke up; he added the child at the last moment, when his own tale was already at the printer's.
Q 18In 'The Emperor's New Clothes', what does Andersen's emperor do when the whole town shouts the truth?
Walks on, prouder than ever
Walks on, prouder than ever: he suspects they are right but decides the procession must go on, and his noblemen carry a train that isn't there. In Andersen's first draft, nobody in the crowd spoke up at all.
Q 19When Andersen's first fairy tales appeared, what did several of his friends advise him to do?
Stop writing them
Stop writing them, they said, and one journal called the tales childish after his successful novel. Andersen went back to novels for a year, but the tales, he wrote later, 'forced themselves from me'.
Q 20Which philosopher's first book, in 1838, was a long attack on Andersen as a novelist?
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard set out to review Andersen's novel Only a Fiddler and ended up with a whole book arguing he had no philosophy of life. Andersen heard it was coming and felt martyred before it was even out.
Charles Dickens had once given him his books inscribed from 'his friend and admirer'. When Dickens died in 1870, Andersen wrote in his diary that now he would never learn why the letters had stopped.
Q 24In which New York park does a bronze Andersen sit with an open book, paid for partly by Danish and American schoolchildren?
Central Park
Central Park. Children climb into the statue's lap, and storytellers have gathered young audiences around it every summer since the 1950s.
Q 25Besides writing, which craft was Andersen known for, often practised to amuse his hosts' children?
Paper cutting
Paper cutting helped earn his keep: at the manor houses where he stayed as a guest he repaid his hosts with readings and cut-outs, and one Christmas he made the tree decorations for an estate's poor children.
Q 26Which Andersen tale is widely believed to have been inspired by his love for Jenny Lind?
'The Nightingale'
'The Nightingale' was written in two days, weeks after her Copenhagen concerts, and she became known as the Swedish Nightingale. She liked him but never loved him back, calling him 'a child' and her brother.
Q 27When Andersen died, a leather pouch at his chest held a farewell letter from whom?
His first love
His first love, Riborg Voigt, was engaged to another man when they met and turned him down by letter. She never forgot him either: his poems and a bouquet lay hidden in a secret drawer of her desk until she died.
Q 28Andersen's father went to war in 1812 as a paid substitute, when Denmark was allied to which ruler?
Napoleon of France
Napoleon of France was the shoemaker's hero, his son wrote. He took a farmer's son's place for pay that the state bankruptcy of 1813 all but wiped out, got no farther than Holstein and came home broken in health.
Q 29In which Andersen tale does the title character pine hopelessly for a stove?
'The Snowman'
'The Snowman' can't say why the stove's glow draws him so. When he melts, the reason is left standing in the yard: the boys had built him around an old stove rake.
Q 30In Andersen's 'The Shadow', what finally happens to the scholar whose shadow takes on a life of its own?
Executed
Executed, quietly, on the very evening his former shadow marries a princess. He had refused to go on posing as the shadow's shadow and threatened to tell her the truth.