Robert Burns Trivia
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46 free Robert Burns trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Robert Burns packed a lot into 37 years, and this quiz follows the whole run of it: the clay-and-thatch cottage his father built at Alloway, the debating club and Masonic lodge in Tarbolton, the Belles of Mauchline, the Jamaica job he never took because a three-shilling book of poems made him famous first, the pony ride to Edinburgh, the Nasmyth portrait, the excise rounds in Dumfriesshire and the military funeral in 1796. The poems and songs get their own stretch: Tam's grey mare and the Devil on the bagpipes, the mouse's nest at Mossgiel, the Bruce's speech in Scots Wha Hae, the true meaning of Auld Lang Syne and the country that used its tune as a national anthem. Then Burns Night itself, from the Selkirk Grace to neeps and tatties, and the long afterlife: Steinbeck and Salinger's titles, Bob Dylan's favourite lyric, a Soviet stamp, a crater on Mercury and the oldest statue of the poet, which is in Australia. The easy questions suit anyone who has been to a Burns supper; the expert tier reaches Elizabeth Paton, the Royal Dumfries Volunteers and Robert Fergusson. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Burns, his poems and Burns suppers, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Robert Burns was born in which Ayrshire village, near the town of Ayr?
Alloway
Alloway: Burns later set the witches' dance of 'Tam o' Shanter' in the village's ruined old kirk, where his father lies buried.
Q 02Which woman, a Kirkoswald tenant farmer's daughter, was Robert Burns's mother?
Agnes Broun
Agnes Broun's household included an old woman whose tales of ghosts, fairies and witches, Burns said, cultivated the seeds of his poetry.
Q 03The cottage where Burns was born was built by his father in 1757 from what materials?
Clay and thatch
Clay and thatch: after the family moved out, the cottage became an ale house, and it stayed one until trustees bought and restored it in 1881.
Q 04In 1780 Burns and his brother Gilbert founded a debating society in their local village known as what?
The Tarbolton Bachelors' Club
The Tarbolton Bachelors' Club made Burns its first president, and one early debate asked whether a poor farmer should marry a rich plain girl or a charming penniless one.
Q 05In July 1781, aged 22, Burns was initiated into which fraternal order?
The Freemasons
The Freemasons of his lodge later received a farewell song from Burns, written in 1786 when he believed he was about to leave Scotland.
Q 06Jean Armour, whom Burns married in 1788, belonged to a group of local girls known as what?
The Belles of Mauchline
The Belles of Mauchline were warned in a Burns song to beware of 'Rob Mossgiel', a warning Jean Armour ignored: she bore his twins in 1786.
Q 07In 1786 Burns accepted a plantation book-keeper's job in which colony before his poems kept him home?
Jamaica
Jamaica: he hoped the book would earn enough to pay his passage, and the post meant helping to oversee enslaved workers on sugar plantations.
Q 08Which woman, Burns's 'Highland Mary', may have exchanged Bibles with him in 1786?
Mary Campbell
Mary Campbell died at Greenock that October, and three years later Burns wrote the poem now called 'To Mary in Heaven' in her memory.
Q 09Burns's first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was published in 1786 in which town?
Kilmarnock
Kilmarnock: country readers and Edinburgh critics alike hailed the book, and that November Burns set out for the capital to be lionized.
Q 10In Burns's poem 'To a Louse', the poet spots the louse crawling on a lady's what, in church?
Bonnet
Bonnet: the sight moves the poet to wish we all had the gift 'to see oursels as ithers see us'.
Q 11In 'The Twa Dogs', from his first book, the dog Luath was modelled on Burns's own pet of what breed?
Border Collie
Border Collie: Burns took the name Luath from Cuchullin's dog in Ossian's Fingal, as his own footnote to the poem explains.
Q 12Which painter's 1787 portrait of Burns was engraved as the frontispiece for the Edinburgh edition of his poems?
Alexander Nasmyth
Alexander Nasmyth painted it at his publisher's request, and decades after the poet's death he painted Burns again, full-length.
Q 13In his letters to Agnes 'Nancy' McLehose, Burns signed himself with which pen name?
Sylvander
Sylvander paired with her 'Clarinda', and their parting in 1791 inspired his song 'Ae Fond Kiss'.
Q 21Which tea clipper is named after the short shirt worn by the witch Nannie in 'Tam o' Shanter'?
Cutty Sark
Cutty Sark is Scots for 'short shirt', and Tam gives himself away by shouting 'Weel done, Cutty-sark!' at the dancing witch.
Q 22Which John Steinbeck book takes its title from a line by Burns?
Of Mice and Men
Of Mice and Men borrows from 'To a Mouse', where Burns counts the mouse luckier than himself, since only the present touches her.
Q 23According to his brother Gilbert, Burns composed 'To a Mouse' while doing what?
Still holding his plough
Still holding his plough, Gilbert said, and in the poem Burns apologises to the mouse that man's dominion has broken nature's social union.
Q 14Burns contributed enthusiastically to which song collection produced by Edinburgh engraver James Johnson?
The Scots Musical Museum
The Scots Musical Museum soon had Burns as its virtual editor, yet he took no fee for the songs he gave it.
Q 15After Edinburgh, Burns took a 1788 lease on which Dumfriesshire farm beside the River Nith?
Ellisland
Ellisland's exhausted, stony soil made farming a struggle, yet it was there that Burns wrote 'Tam o' Shanter'.
Q 16Alongside farming, Burns trained for and in 1789 was appointed to which government job?
Exciseman
Exciseman: the post meant riding some 200 miles a week, on top of labouring in his own fields.
Q 17Burns wrote 'Tam o' Shanter' chiefly for which antiquarian's 'Antiquities of Scotland'?
Francis Grose
Francis Grose, Gilbert Burns recalled, agreed to print a drawing of the local haunted kirk if Burns would give him something to go with it.
Q 18In 'Tam o' Shanter', what is the name of Tam's grey mare?
Meg
Meg outruns the witches, but the one leading the chase grabs her tail, and she escapes with barely a stump left.
Q 19In 'Tam o' Shanter', who is playing the bagpipes at the witches' dance in the haunted kirk?
The Devil
The Devil, 'auld Nick' in the shape of a big black shaggy dog, pipes for the dancers, until Tam's shout of praise plunges the kirk into darkness.
Q 20Tam o' Shanter escapes the witches because, in the old belief, they cannot do what?
Cross running water
Cross running water: Burns called it a well-known fact that no evil power can pursue anyone beyond the middle of a running stream.
Q 24Which J. D. Salinger novel's title comes from misreading Burns's 'Comin' Through the Rye'?
The Catcher in the Rye
Holden Caulfield imagines himself catching children before they fall off a cliff.
Q 25Which singer-songwriter named Burns's 'A Red, Red Rose' in 2008 as the lyric that most affected his life?
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan named it in HMV's 'My Inspiration' campaign; Burns had first given the words to Edinburgh composer Pietro Urbani, who printed them in 1794.
Q 26Burns's 'A Man's a Man for A' That', written in Dumfries, drew on the ideas of which political writer?
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine's Rights of Man shaped its ideas of equality, and the song was sung at the opening of the devolved Scottish Parliament in 1999.
Q 27Burns's 'Scots Wha Hae' (1793) is a speech by which Scottish leader before Bannockburn?
Robert the Bruce
Robert the Bruce is the speaker, but Burns told his publisher he was also stirred by freedom struggles 'not quite so ancient', seen as a nod to radicals of his day.
Q 28The music now sung to 'Auld Lang Syne', attached to the words in 1799, is best described as what?
A pentatonic folk melody
A pentatonic folk melody: the English composer William Shield seems to have quoted a similar tune in his 1782 comic opera Rosina.
Q 29The tune of 'Auld Lang Syne' served as the national anthem of which country until 1972?
The Maldives
The Maldives: Mohamed Jameel Didi set his anthem's words to the tune after hearing it chime on his uncle's clock, and a new melody replaced it in 1972.
Q 30Burns's 'Address to a Haggis' favours the dish over the cuisine of which country?
France
France: the poem sneers at fashionable French ragouts and fricassees, and boasts that a haggis-fed rustic makes the earth tremble at his tread.