Søren Kierkegaard
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50 free Søren Kierkegaard trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Søren Kierkegaard wrote most of his books in a single furious decade, published many of them under invented names, and died young in the middle of a public quarrel with his country's clergy. A century later, philosophers, novelists and religious thinkers were still arguing with him. Few writers have had so quiet a life and so loud an afterlife. This quiz covers the man and the ideas together. Expect questions on his strict upbringing and his father's long shadow, the engagement he broke and never got over, the newspaper feud that made him a figure of fun, and the books that carry his reputation, including Either/Or, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death. There are questions too on the pen names, the stages of life, what he meant by faith, and the writers who later borrowed from him. It is pitched for philosophy students revising for a class, readers who have met him through one famous book, and quiz fans who enjoy a thinker with a strange life story. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the reasoning sticks as well as the fact.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The surname Kierkegaard is a variant of a Danish word ending in 'gård', or yard, that names which place?
Churchyard
Churchyard, in the sense of a cemetery, is the word's everyday meaning in Danish, built from the words for church and for a yard or farm.
Q 02Kierkegaard broke off his engagement to which young woman, then spent years writing books that secretly addressed her?
Regine Olsen
Regine Olsen was engaged to him for about a year; she went on to marry her former tutor, yet Kierkegaard's will still named her as heir to what little he left.
Q 03Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling circles around which biblical figure, whom its narrator admits he cannot understand?
Abraham
Abraham's journey to sacrifice his son Isaac opens the book in four different retellings, each imagining another way the story might have gone.
Q 04Kierkegaard is widely called the father of which philosophical movement, later taken up by Sartre and Heidegger?
Existentialism
Existentialism got its name nearly a century after he died: the word was coined in the 1940s, and Sartre at first rejected the label.
Q 05Which phrase for believing beyond proof is popularly credited to Kierkegaard, who never used it in that form?
Leap of faith
Leap of faith is the popular label, but his own term was a 'qualitative leap': a change that no chain of reasoning can carry a person across step by step.
Q 06A young Kierkegaard's first monograph was a 70-page attack on the novel Only a Fiddler by which famous storyteller?
Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen's novel, the review complained, leaned on its author's own life instead of a mature view of life. The two men now lie in the same cemetery.
Q 07Kierkegaard's book The Sickness unto Death argues that the deadly sickness of its title is which spiritual condition?
Despair
Despair, he argues, is a kind of spiritual death that comes from refusing to be oneself, and the opposite he sets against it is religious belief.
Q 08In Kierkegaard's Either/Or, the pleasure-seeking writer known only as A declares what to be the root of all evil?
Boredom
Boredom must be dodged at any cost, A argues, and his cure is to rotate one's pleasures like crops while steering clear of friendship, marriage and steady work.
Q 09Kierkegaard's university dissertation on the concept of irony made continual reference to which ancient Greek thinker?
Socrates
Socrates stayed his lifelong model, and the dissertation argued that the comic playwright Aristophanes had caught the man's irony better than his own pupils did.
Q 10Kierkegaard was born, wrote nearly all his books and died in which northern European city, a place he rarely left?
Copenhagen
Copenhagen was his whole world: a handful of trips to Germany were almost the only times he ever went abroad.
Q 11Kierkegaard is often read as the arch-opponent of which German philosopher, builder of an all-embracing system?
Hegel
Hegel's thought dominated Danish intellectual life by the late 1830s, and scholars now think the sharpest barbs were aimed at the local professors who preached it.
Q 12Which subject did Kierkegaard officially study at university, dawdling for a decade before he finally sat his exams?
Theology
Theology was only his official subject: he drifted into literature and philosophy and ran up debts, and buckled down only after his father died.
Q 13Kierkegaard won royal permission to write his dissertation in Danish, but had to defend it publicly in which language?
Latin
Latin was still the language of Danish degrees: he also had to condense the Danish text into a series of Latin theses before the degree could be awarded.
Q 21Kierkegaard's father believed he had doomed his family by cursing God as a starving shepherd boy in which Danish region?
Jutland
Jutland's bleak heath haunted the family: the father was convinced that none of his children would live past 33, the age reached by Christ.
Q 22Kierkegaard's mother Ane, his father's second wife, had earlier worked in the family household in which role?
Maid
Maid and distant cousin to her husband, she is never once mentioned in her son's writings, not even in his journal on the day she died.
Q 23Kierkegaard's older brother Peter, who outlived him by three decades, rose to which rank in the Danish clergy?
Bishop
Bishop of Aalborg was the post Peter took up soon after Søren died; he had criticised his brother's books at clergy meetings, yet he gave the eulogy.
Q 14Kierkegaard's Either/Or includes a long essay on the musical-erotic built around which composer's opera about Don Juan?
Mozart
Mozart was his musical idol, and the essay sets out to show through Don Giovanni that music can express restless desire in a way that words cannot.
Q 15In Kierkegaard's Either/Or, the long letters defending marriage and commitment are written by a man of which profession?
Judge
Judge Vilhelm, known in the book simply as B, argues that a committed life keeps the beauty of the pleasure-seeker's life instead of destroying it.
Q 16Caricatures in a Danish satirical paper in 1846 mocked Kierkegaard by exaggerating which detail of his appearance?
Uneven trouser legs
Uneven trouser legs featured in the cartoons, and the street mockery that followed made him give up his habit of strolling the city and chatting to everyone.
Q 17After breaking off his engagement in 1841, Kierkegaard fled to which German city, where he drafted much of Either/Or?
Berlin
Berlin was the one foreign city he came to know: he made four trips there, and they were almost the only journeys abroad of his life.
Q 18Kierkegaard's last writings attacked what, his word for a society where church membership comes with birth?
Christendom
Christendom, he argued, made people lazy about religion: when everyone is a believer by birth, nobody has to become one.
Q 19Kierkegaard publicly dared which Danish satirical weekly to mock him, and then endured months of its cartoons?
The Corsair
The Corsair took up the dare so thoroughly that he came to divide his life into the time before the affair and the time after it.
Q 20Kierkegaard was brought up in which Protestant tradition, the one followed by Denmark's established national church?
Lutheran
Lutheran teaching shaped him, though his father also played a leading part in a Moravian congregation that left its own mark on the boy.
Q 24At Kierkegaard's funeral, which relative caused a disturbance by protesting his burial by the official church?
His nephew
His nephew Henrik Lund argued that the dead man had broken with the institution and would never have agreed to it, and was later fined for the outburst.
Q 25Which source of money let Kierkegaard live as a full-time author, funding both his books and his living expenses?
An inheritance
An inheritance of about 31,000 rigsdaler came from his father, who had risen from rural poverty to become a wealthy merchant.
Q 26Kierkegaard wrote and self-published which series of pamphlets in 1855 to spearhead his attack on the Danish clergy?
The Moment
The Moment was cut short when he collapsed in the street before its tenth issue could be published; he died in hospital some weeks later.
Q 27As a boy, Kierkegaard was nicknamed what at home, thanks to his precocious habit of making satirical remarks?
The Fork
The Fork was the name his father used, and the same account remembers the boy going about in a coat the colour of red cabbage.
Q 28Which Vienna-born philosopher, while living in Norway, learned Danish in order to read Kierkegaard in the original?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein picked up Norwegian to talk with the villagers around him, and Danish for one purpose: reading Kierkegaard.
Q 29In 1888 the Danish critic Georg Brandes wrote urging which German philosopher to read Kierkegaard, apparently in vain?
Nietzsche
Nietzsche seems never to have taken the advice: no evidence shows he read any of the Dane's works, though Brandes thought the two had much in common.
Q 30Which French writer on the absurd dismissed Kierkegaard's turn to God as a form of 'philosophical suicide'?
Albert Camus
Albert Camus rejected both literal suicide and this religious escape, insisting that the absurd has to be faced for what it is.