Rudyard Kipling Trivia
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48 free Rudyard Kipling trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Rudyard Kipling trivia for readers who grew up on Mowgli and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, English literature students, and anyone who has recited If without knowing it was written about a failed South African raid. This quiz follows Kipling from his birth in Bombay and the miserable years in Southsea he called the House of Desolation, through his newspaper apprenticeship in Lahore, to London fame with Barrack-Room Ballads and the strange Vermont interlude in which he wrote the Jungle Books. It covers the major works, Kim and the Great Game, the Just So Stories told to his daughter Josephine, Captains Courageous, The Man Who Would Be King, Gunga Din and Mandalay, plus the Nobel Prize he won at 41, the honours he refused, the death of his son John at Loos and the phrases he chose for the war graves and the Cenotaph. It ends at Bateman's in Sussex and Poets' Corner. Questions range from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. If you enjoy this quiz, try our Jungle Book, Victorian literature and Nobel laureates quizzes next.
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Q 01In which city was Rudyard Kipling born in 1865?
Bombay
Bombay's newly founded Sir J. J. School of Art had hired his father, John Lockwood Kipling, to teach architectural sculpture, so the newlyweds sailed for India months before Rudyard was born.
Q 02Kipling's parents met while his father worked in the potteries there, then named him after Rudyard Lake in which English county?
Staffordshire
Staffordshire's Rudyard Lake is really a reservoir, built in the 1790s to feed the Caldon Canal; John Lockwood Kipling courted Alice Macdonald there in 1863, and they named their first child after it.
Q 03Which three-time British prime minister was Kipling's first cousin?
Stanley Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin's mother and Kipling's mother Alice were two of the Macdonald sisters; in 1936 Baldwin, then serving as prime minister, was one of the pallbearers at his cousin's funeral.
Q 04What did Kipling call the Southsea boarding house where he and his sister were left as young children?
The House of Desolation
The House of Desolation was his name for Lorne Lodge, where Mrs Holloway's bullying drove him to tell careful lies, a habit he later called 'the foundation of literary effort'.
Q 05Kipling's schooldays at the United Services College in Devon inspired which story collection?
Stalky & Co.
Stalky & Co. turns a cheap, rough new school that readied boys for the army, where the short-sighted Kipling had a hard start, into an unruly paradise; the bookish Beetle is Kipling himself.
Q 06At sixteen Kipling returned to India to work as assistant editor of which newspaper?
The Civil and Military Gazette
The Civil and Military Gazette had an editorial staff of two, so Kipling was, as he put it, fifty per cent of it; he still called the little daily his 'first mistress and most true love'.
Q 07What was Kipling's first prose collection, published in Calcutta in January 1888?
Plain Tales from the Hills
Plain Tales from the Hills began as newspaper filler: twenty-eight of its forty stories had first run in his own paper, slotted in, he said, 'when and as padding was needed'.
Q 08Which American author said of Kipling, 'he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest'?
Mark Twain
Mark Twain said it after an unknown young Kipling turned up unannounced at his Elmira home in 1889; Kipling's write-up records Twain's advice to get your facts first, then 'distort 'em as much as you please'.
Q 09Which novelist gave away Kipling's American bride, Carrie Balestier, at their London wedding in 1892?
Henry James
Henry James was one of only a handful of guests, because London was deep in a flu epidemic so bad that, Kipling wrote, 'the undertakers had run out of black horses'.
Q 10In which US state did Kipling live from 1892 to 1896, writing the Jungle Books there?
Vermont
Vermont was where his American wife's family lived; Naulakha, the house the couple built outside Brattleboro, is now a National Historic Landmark that anyone can rent for a holiday.
Q 11Kipling named the house he built in New England, Naulakha, after what?
A novel he co-wrote
A novel he co-wrote with his late friend Wolcott Balestier gave the house its name; the book's title was misspelt The Naulahka, and the house got the correct spelling.
Q 12Kipling quit New England in 1896 after having which relative arrested for threatening his life on a country road?
His brother-in-law
His brother-in-law Beatty Balestier, a charming drunk, swore to kill him; Kipling had him arrested, but the hearing drew hordes of reporters and the intensely private author sailed for England within months.
Q 13The Mowgli stories in The Jungle Book are set around which place in what is now Madhya Pradesh?
Seeonee
Q 21The poem 'If—' was written as a tribute to which leader of a failed 1895-96 raid on the Transvaal?
Leander Starr Jameson
Leander Starr Jameson was tried and jailed in England for the botched raid, yet rose to be prime minister of the Cape Colony; Kipling wrote in his memoir that the verses 'were drawn from Jameson's character'.
Q 22Two lines of 'If—' about 'Triumph and Disaster' are inscribed above the players' entrance at which venue?
Wimbledon's Centre Court
Wimbledon's Centre Court players walk out beneath the advice to 'treat those two impostors just the same'; in a 1995 BBC poll the poem was voted Britain's favourite, with twice the votes of the runner-up.
Q 23'If—' first appeared in which 1910 collection of stories and poems?
Seeonee is Kipling's spelling of Seoni, a district he never saw: he wrote the Mowgli tales in a snowbound New England cottage, taking the landscape from another man's books about the area.
Q 14What kind of animal is Baloo, Mowgli's teacher in The Jungle Book?
A bear
A bear: in the book Baloo is 'the sleepy brown bear who teaches the wolf cubs the Law of the Jungle', and he is the first to speak up for Mowgli when the pack debates whether to keep him.
Q 15Which Jungle Book hero is a mongoose who battles the cobras Nag and Nagaina?
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is named for his chattering war cry, 'Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!'; washed out of his burrow by a flood, he is adopted by an English family and repays them by saving them from both cobras.
Q 16The adult who leads a Cub Scout pack traditionally takes the name of which Jungle Book character?
Akela
Akela, the grey Lone Wolf, 'led all the Pack by strength and cunning' from the Council Rock; Cubs borrowed more than his name, and a wolfish Grand Howl is still part of many Cub meetings.
Q 17Kipling's novel Kim popularised which phrase for the Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia?
The Great Game
The Great Game is what the novel's spymasters call their shadow war with Russia; its hero, an Irish soldier's orphan, is trained as a British secret agent while tramping India as the disciple of a Tibetan lama.
Q 18In Kim, the boy hero befriends an aged lama searching for what?
The River of the Arrow
The River of the Arrow sprang up, the lama says, where an arrow shot by the young Buddha fell to earth, and whoever bathes in it is washed clean of all sin and freed from the Wheel of Things.
Q 19Kipling began the Just So Stories as bedtime tales for which daughter, who died of pneumonia in 1899?
Josephine
Josephine, known as Effie, made him tell each tale 'just so', word for word, or she would 'wake up and put back the missing sentence'; the book came out in 1902, three years after her death at six.
Q 20In the Just So Stories, why is the Whale's throat so small?
A sailor wedged a grating there
A sailor wedged a grating there: swallowed whole, the shipwrecked Mariner cut up his raft with a jack-knife, tied the pieces with his suspenders and jammed them in the Whale's throat on his way out.
Rewards and Fairies
Rewards and Fairies printed it after the story 'Brother Square-Toes'; Kipling marvelled that the verses 'escaped from the book, and for a while ran about the world', hung up in offices and set as school punishments.
Q 24Gunga Din, of the famous line 'You're a better man than I am', works as what in the British Indian army?
A water-carrier
A water-carrier, or bhisti: the narrator admits he 'belted' and 'flayed' Din, yet when he is wounded Din brings him water, carries him to a stretcher and is shot a moment later.
Q 25'Mandalay', 'Gunga Din' and 'Danny Deever' were collected in which 1892 volume?
Barrack-Room Ballads
Barrack-Room Ballads speaks in the Cockney voice of the enlisted man who defends the Empire yet is scorned for his low birth; its runaway success made Kipling a force among the poets of his day.
Q 26The poem 'Mandalay' is set in which colony, then part of British India?
Burma
Burma gave the homesick Cockney narrator his 'old Moulmein pagoda', but readers spotted that the sea lies west of Moulmein, so Kipling later changed the pagoda's gaze from 'lookin' eastward' to 'lookin' lazy at the sea'.
Q 27In 'The Man Who Would Be King', Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan set out to rule which remote region?
Kafiristan
Kafiristan's tribes take Dravot for a god until his terrified bride bites him and he bleeds; 'Neither god nor devil but a man!' howl the priests. Sean Connery and Michael Caine played the pair in the 1975 film.
Q 28Kipling's Captains Courageous follows a rich boy rescued by a schooner off which grounds?
The Grand Banks of Newfoundland
The Grand Banks of Newfoundland are where the crew fish him out after he is washed off an ocean liner; the captain refuses to turn back for port, so the millionaire's spoiled son has to work the whole season for his keep.
Q 29Why was the Nobel banquet cancelled when Kipling collected his prize in Stockholm in 1907?
Sweden's king had just died
Sweden's king had just died: Oscar II's death two days before the ceremony put Stockholm into official mourning, and Kipling, at 41 still the youngest winner of the literature prize, met the new king in a half-darkened palace.
Q 30Kipling turned down a knighthood more than once and also declined which official post?
Poet Laureate
Poet Laureate joined the knighthood on his list of refusals: he declined honours offered by his own government yet accepted them from abroad, the Nobel Prize among them.