Oslo Trivia
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47 free Oslo trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Oslo has been called Ánslo, Christiania and Kristiania, burned down fourteen times, and grown from a fjord-side trading post into the electric-car capital of the world. This Oslo trivia quiz covers the city's whole story: Harald Hardrada's founding, the 1624 fire that moved the town, the 1925 name change, the wartime sinking of the Blücher, and the modern waterfront of opera houses and museums. You will also visit the places every traveller knows (Frogner Park's Vigeland sculptures, the Munch Museum, Bygdøy's Viking ships and Kon-Tiki, Holmenkollen, the City Hall where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded) plus the geography, climate, transport and sport that make the city tick. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer is verified and cited to its reference page. If you enjoy this quiz, try our other Scandinavian and world-cities quizzes.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Israel struck the 1993 Oslo Accords, negotiated secretly in the city, with which organisation?
The PLO
The PLO and Israel reached the deal through secret talks in Oslo that began in January 1993, yet the signing ceremony, attended by Rabin and Arafat, was held in Washington that September.
Q 02Which Viking king do the sagas credit with founding Oslo around 1050?
Harald Hardrada
Harald Hardrada is the founder the sagas name, but digs later showed a town there by about 1000: Oslo marked its 900th birthday in 1950, then its 1,000th just fifty years later, in 2000.
Q 03What was Oslo called from 1624 until 1925?
Christiania
After a devastating fire in 1624, King Christian IV rebuilt the town beneath Akershus Fortress and named it Christiania after himself; the spelling Kristiania was used from the late 1800s.
Q 04In which waterfront district did the Oslo Opera House open in 2008?
Bjørvika
Bjørvika was working docks until the 2000s: the Opera House opened there in 2008, the E18 motorway was sunk into a tunnel under the bay in 2010, and the new Munch Museum followed in 2021.
Q 05Which foreign capital ruled Oslo for some four centuries, until a union with Sweden in 1814?
Copenhagen
Copenhagen: the Nordic crowns were joined in 1397, barely a century after King Haakon V had made Oslo his seat, and power moved to the Danish court; Oslo became a national capital once again in 1814.
Q 06The polar ship Fram, now in an Oslo museum, carried which explorer south in the race for the South Pole?
Roald Amundsen
Roald Amundsen borrowed Fram saying he would drift across the Arctic, and almost nobody knew he had turned south until he was at sea; he reached the Pole in December 1911, five weeks before Scott.
Q 07Oslo is the country's largest city; which west-coast port, once the capital itself, is second?
Bergen
Bergen was the capital in the 13th century, until the king moved his seat east to Oslo in 1299; it remains the second-largest city, well ahead of Trondheim and Stavanger.
Q 08Oslo's seal shows St Hallvard with arrows and which heavy object, used to sink his body?
A millstone
A millstone: legend says Hallvard was shot with arrows while sheltering a pregnant woman in his boat, and that his body floated to the surface even with the stone around its neck.
Q 09Which animal gives Oslo its nickname, usually traced to an 1870 poem by Bjørnson?
Tiger
Tiger: the nickname Tigerstaden, 'Tiger City', is usually traced to an 1870 Bjørnson poem, and it began as an insult, with the tiger standing for a cold, dangerous and merciless capital.
Q 10Which crime writer's detective Harry Hole works the streets of Oslo?
Jo Nesbø
Jo Nesbø was a stockbroker fronting the band Di Derre when he took six months off in Australia and came back with the first Harry Hole novel, which sends the Oslo detective to Sydney.
Q 11Which 1985 hit took a-ha, a trio with Oslo roots, to number one in the United States?
Take On Me
Take On Me flopped on its first release in 1984 and stalled again in Britain in early 1985; only a new video, mixing pencil animation with live film, turned it into an American number one that October.
Q 12Which river is traditionally seen as the line between Oslo's East End and West End?
Akerselva
Akerselva's waterfalls powered the mills that industrialised the city from the 1840s, but workers' districts grew up on both of its banks, so the neat east-west line is more a saying than a fact.
Q 13Whose surname became an English word for traitor after his 1940 radio coup in Oslo?
Vidkun Quisling
Q 21Which award is presented in Oslo every December?
Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo on 10 December, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death, by a committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament, while the other Nobel prizes are presented in Stockholm.
Q 22In which Oslo building has Norway's best-known December prize ceremony been held since 1990?
The City Hall
The City Hall was begun in 1931, but the war stalled the work and it opened only in 1950; its twin brick towers face the harbour, and the ceremony has been held there since 1990.
Q 23What is the Storting, which has met in its own building on Oslo's Karl Johans gate since 1866?
Norway's parliament
Vidkun Quisling named himself prime minister over Oslo radio on 9 April 1940, as German troops arrived; they pushed him aside within a week, by which time The Times was already printing 'quisling' to mean traitor.
Q 14Which Oslo-born woman won three straight Olympic figure skating golds, then became a Hollywood film star?
Sonja Henie
Sonja Henie came last of eight at her first Winter Olympics in 1924, aged just eleven, then won gold in 1928, 1932 and 1936 before Hollywood made her a star of skating films.
Q 15Which sculptor's works fill Frogner Park?
Gustav Vigeland
Gustav Vigeland struck a deal with the city in 1921: it built him a studio and home, and he gave it everything he made from then on, which is how Frogner Park came to hold more than 200 of his sculptures.
Q 16Which Oslo peninsula holds the Fram ship and the open-air folk museum?
Bygdøy
Bygdøy is no longer what its Old Norse name says, 'the inhabited island': it is joined to the mainland now, and a large part of it is still a royal estate, home to the king's official summer residence.
Q 17Which painting did armed robbers carry out of an Oslo museum in broad daylight in 2004, to be recovered two years later?
The Scream
The Scream has been stolen in Oslo twice: one version went from the National Gallery on the day the 1994 Winter Olympics opened, and another was taken at gunpoint from the Munch Museum in 2004.
Q 18Which two Thor Heyerdahl craft are displayed together in an Oslo museum?
Kon-Tiki and Ra II
Kon-Tiki and Ra II are the two that survived: the first Ra broke up and was abandoned short of the Caribbean in 1969, and Heyerdahl burned Tigris at Djibouti in 1978 in protest at the wars around him.
Q 19Oslo's Oseberg Viking ship was dug out of what in 1904?
Burial mound
A burial mound: the ship was no warrior's grave but that of two women, laid in it in 834 with sleighs, textiles, horses and dogs.
Q 20King Oscar II paid to move which medieval wooden building from Gol to Oslo?
A stave church
A stave church: Gol's was taken down in the 1880s after the parish built a new one, and the king paid to re-erect it in Oslo, where most of its exterior was rebuilt on the model of Borgund's.
The Storting is Norway's parliament, and unlike most it can never be dissolved early: there are no snap elections, so its 169 members always sit out the full four years.
Q 24Which firm designed the Oslo Opera House, opened in 2008?
Snøhetta
Snøhetta won the 2000 design competition with a marble-clad building whose sloping roof doubles as a public plaza, so visitors can walk right up and over the opera house.
Q 25What is Sognsvann, last stop on an Oslo metro line and gateway to Nordmarka?
Forest lake
Sognsvann is a forest lake where a metro line ends, so Oslo locals can take the train to a summer swim or to the path that circles its shore.
Q 26Which playwright's words are set in steel into Oslo's pavements?
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen walked each day from his flat in Arbins gate to the Grand Café, and quotations from his work now lie in steel letters in the pavements along that route.
Q 27Which Nobel-winning author grew up in Oslo and described it in Elleve år?
Sigrid Undset
Sigrid Undset, best known for Kristin Lavransdatter, was born in Denmark and came to Oslo as a toddler; Elleve år (1934) retells her childhood there, and she won the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Q 28Who carried the 1952 Winter Olympic torch to Oslo?
Skiers
Skiers: the flame was lit not at Olympia but in the hearth of skiing pioneer Sondre Norheim's home in Morgedal, and a relay of skiers carried it to the opening ceremony in Oslo.
Q 29Which venue hosts Oslo's annual Diamond League athletics meeting?
Bislett Stadium
Bislett Stadium stages the Bislett Games each summer, yet for decades the same oval was iced every winter for speed skating, including the 1952 Winter Olympics; it was torn down and rebuilt in 2004-05.
Q 30In which sport is Oslo's Vålerenga the most successful club in Norwegian history?
Ice hockey
Ice hockey: Vålerenga won its first national title in 1960 by dethroning local rivals Gamlebyen, and has since taken more than any other club; its home, Jordal Amfi, stands where the 1952 Olympic rink did.