King Arthur Trivia
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99 free King Arthur trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
King Arthur trivia that goes well beyond 'name the sword'. This quiz starts with the familiar legend - Uther and Igraine at Tintagel, Merlin, Guinevere and Lancelot, the Round Table, Mordred at Camlann and the voyage to Avalon - and then digs into where it all came from: the Welsh poems and the Historia Brittonum with its twelve battles, Geoffrey of Monmouth's inventive Historia, Chrétien de Troyes, the Vulgate Cycle and Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. The last section covers Arthur's afterlife in popular culture: Tennyson's Idylls, Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, T. H. White and Disney's The Sword in the Stone, the musical Camelot and the Kennedy connection, and the 2004 and 2017 films. Questions are ordered roughly from easy to expert, so casual players and medievalists both get their turn. Every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. If you want more, we also have dedicated quizzes on the Holy Grail and on Excalibur.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Le Morte d'Arthur, which woman traps Arthur's wizard beneath a rock?
Nimue
Nimue: she kept him close until she had learned all she wanted from him, then shut him in for good.
Q 02Which composer wrote the music for John Dryden's 1691 semi-opera King Arthur?
Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell: in his preface Dryden admitted he had altered his first design so as not to offend the government of the day.
Q 03Who is King Arthur's wife?
Guinevere
Guinevere: one of the earliest tales about her, the Life of Gildas, has her carried off by a king called Melwas.
Q 04Who is King Arthur's father?
Uther Pendragon
Uther Pendragon: in one telling he took his name after a star with a dragon-shaped ball of fire foretold his reign.
Q 05Which knight's affair with Arthur's queen was introduced in The Knight of the Cart?
Lancelot
Lancelot: the poem retold an older tale of the queen's abduction and made Lancelot both her rescuer and her lover.
Q 06Against whom does Arthur fight his final battle?
Mordred
Mordred: in the 12th-century histories he is Arthur's nephew, who crowns himself king while Arthur campaigns abroad.
Q 07Arthur's final battle is fought at which place?
Camlann
Camlann: one Welsh triad says the battle happened because of a blow struck in a quarrel between two sisters.
Q 08Which Arthurian knight's name became a byword for a man of great purity and nobility?
Galahad
Galahad: 13th-century writers created him as a new, spiritually pure hero for the quest, replacing Perceval.
Q 09Arthur is conceived at which Cornish castle?
Tintagel
Tintagel: digs in 2016 and 2017 uncovered a 5th or 6th-century palace with goods from the eastern Mediterranean, so the headland was probably a royal seat.
Q 10What is the name of Gorlois's wife, with whom Arthur's disguised father conceives him?
Igraine
Igraine: in one later telling her husband had been dead for hours that night, so Arthur could not be called a bastard.
Q 11Geoffrey of Monmouth's history says a wizard helped move which famous prehistoric monument from Ireland to Britain?
Stonehenge
Stonehenge: Geoffrey calls it the Giant's Dance, fetched as a memorial, and its smaller bluestones really did travel far, from Wales.
Q 12Who wrote Le Morte d'Arthur, the great 15th-century English retelling of the whole legend?
Thomas Malory
Thomas Malory calls himself a 'knight prisoner' and asks readers to pray that God sends him 'good deliverance', so he probably wrote it in jail.
Q 13Le Morte d'Arthur was first printed in 1485 by which pioneering English printer?
William Caxton
Q 21In Disney's The Sword in the Stone (1963), what is the wizard's talking pet Archimedes?
An owl
An owl: Archimedes shares the wizard's cottage, where the boy's lessons come from being turned into a fish, a bird and a squirrel.
Q 22In Disney's The Sword in the Stone, what is young Arthur's nickname?
Wart
Wart is an orphan who only wants to help his foster brother Kay become a knight, and he ends up king instead.
Q 23In Disney's The Sword in the Stone, the sword is lodged in what object sitting on top of the stone?
An anvil
An anvil: the boy pulls the sword out only because he forgot his foster brother's sword and found the inn locked.
William Caxton, who set up England's first printing press, divided the text into 21 books and wrote his own chapter summaries.
Q 14Which famous Arthurian object first appears in Wace's Roman de Brut, finished in 1155?
The Round Table
The Round Table: Wace says Arthur had it made so that none of his proud barons could claim a higher seat than the others.
Q 15Tennyson dedicated his Arthurian poem cycle to which late royal, who had held its poems dear?
Prince Albert
Prince Albert: Tennyson's dedication suggests the prince loved the poems because he found in them 'some image of himself'.
Q 16In Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia, Arthur holds his great Pentecost court in which Welsh town?
Caerleon
Caerleon drew Tennyson too: he lodged at an inn there in 1856 while working on his Arthurian poems.
Q 17Which sorceress, Arthur's half-sister, rules the isle to which he is carried after his last battle?
Morgan le Fay
Morgan le Fay first appears as a great healer leading nine magical sisters, with no family tie to Arthur at all.
Q 18In the French prose romances, Arthur's treacherous son is born of incest with which half-sister?
Morgause
Morgause: her baby was foretold to destroy the kingdom, so in one telling Arthur set every child born on May Day adrift in a ship that sank.
Q 19Arthur's wizard is traditionally said to be the son of a mortal woman and what?
An incubus
An incubus: being fatherless nearly got him killed, because a king's magicians wanted a fatherless boy's blood to make a crumbling tower stand.
Q 20Which actor played the young wizard in the BBC's 2008–2012 fantasy series Merlin?
Colin Morgan
Colin Morgan's young wizard has to hide his powers, because the king has outlawed magic in the realm.
Q 24In Disney's The Sword in the Stone, the wizard fights a shape-shifting duel with which witch?
Madam Mim
Madam Mim cheats again and again in their duel of transformations, but the wizard wins by using his wits rather than strength.
Q 25Disney's The Sword in the Stone adapts the first part of which 1958 novel by T. H. White?
The Once and Future King
The Once and Future King opens with the young Arthur learning about power and war by being turned into fish, hawks, ants, geese and badgers.
Q 26In T. H. White's novel, what is odd about Arthur's tutor?
He lives backwards through time
He lives backwards through time, so he already knows what will happen to Arthur and keeps getting muddled about the present.
Q 27Who wrote the 1889 satire A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court?
Mark Twain
Mark Twain's Yankee secretly makes blasting powder and uses a lightning rod to blow up the court wizard's tower.
Q 28Alfred Tennyson's Arthurian cycle, first published in 1859, is titled what?
Idylls of the King
Idylls of the King ends with the dying Arthur telling his last knight that 'the old order changeth, yielding place to new'.
Q 29Which Tennyson poem's cursed heroine sees the world only in a mirror?
The Lady of Shalott
The Lady of Shalott dies singing as she drifts downriver, after she finally turns from the mirror to look at a passing knight.
Q 30Who plays the title role in the 2004 film King Arthur, directed by Antoine Fuqua?
Clive Owen
Clive Owen's film was sold as the historical truth, but even its consultant called the story fiction built on historical facts.