Ulysses Trivia
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50 free Ulysses trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Ulysses trivia usually means one thing: James Joyce's 1922 novel about a single Dublin day, 16 June 1904. This quiz walks the route with it, from Buck Mulligan's shaving bowl on the Sandycove tower to Molly Bloom's unpunctuated 'Yes', taking in the mutton kidney, the lemon soap, the gorgonzola sandwich, the mistaken racing tip, the biscuit tin, the brothel written as a play, and the 50-question catechism Joyce liked best. Characters get their own questions too: where Molly was born, where Bloom's father came from, who Mulligan really was, and the Trieste businessman who was one model for Bloom. The second half follows the book out into the world: Sylvia Beach's Paris shop, the 1,000-copy first edition, The Little Review prosecution, Judge Woolsey's 'emetic but not aphrodisiac' ruling, the British ban until 1936, the Joyce Wars over the corrected text, RTÉ's 30-hour radio version, the 1967 film Ireland banned, and the birth of Bloomsday. A short closing set covers the other famous Ulysses names people search for: Tennyson's poem, the ESA-NASA solar probe and President Grant. For the man himself, see our James Joyce quiz. Easy questions suit anyone who has heard of Bloomsday; the expert tier is for people who have actually finished the book. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the novel, its characters and its publication history, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Ulysses began as an idea for one more short story in which earlier James Joyce collection?
Dubliners
Dubliners was to have had a last story called 'Ulysses', about a Dublin man named Hunter; Joyce never wrote it, and over the next fifteen years the idea swelled into the novel.
Q 02Ulysses was published in full on 2 February 1922, a date chosen because it was what?
Joyce's 40th birthday
Joyce's 40th birthday was the day he had resolved the book must appear, and his publisher had the first copies from the printer in her hands that very morning.
Q 03Ulysses is the Roman name for which hero of Homer's epics?
Odysseus
Odysseus took ten years to sail home from Troy; Joyce shrinks the voyage to one ordinary day's walk around Dublin.
Q 04In the 'Ithaca' episode of Ulysses, what drink does Bloom make for Stephen when he finally brings him home?
Cocoa
Cocoa, shared at the kitchen table, is as close as the two men come: after a whole day of converging, Stephen turns down the offer of a bed and walks off into the night.
Q 05In Ulysses, what is Leopold Bloom's job?
Advertising canvasser
Advertising canvasser: he spends part of the day trying to place an ad for the merchant Alexander Keyes in the Freeman's Journal, only for the editor to turn it down.
Q 06The first words spoken aloud in Ulysses, intoned over a shaving bowl, are in which language?
Latin
Latin: a medical student, razor and mirror crossed on his bowl, intones the opening words of the Catholic Mass in mockery, and the book begins with a parody of a sacrament.
Q 07Ulysses opens on the roof of a Martello tower in which Dublin suburb?
Sandycove
Sandycove's tower was built in 1804 as a defence against Napoleon; since 16 June 1962 it has been a museum to the novel that opens on its roof.
Q 08Ulysses' famous first sentence introduces which character coming from the stairhead with a bowl of lather?
Buck Mulligan
Buck Mulligan, 'stately, plump', is a medical student who has made the tower his own; by the end of the first episode Stephen has decided he will not sleep there that night.
Q 09Which Dublin wit, a friend Joyce fell out with in 1904, was the model for the medical student who opens Ulysses?
Oliver St John Gogarty
Oliver St John Gogarty leased the real tower and paid the rent himself, hoping to give the penniless Joyce a place to write; in the novel Joyce has Stephen pay it.
Q 10Joyce himself stayed in the Martello tower where Ulysses opens, in September 1904, for how long?
Six nights
Six nights was all: by his host's later account he left abruptly after a housemate, startled awake by a nightmare, brandished a loaded revolver, a scene the novel turns into the Englishman's dream of a black panther.
Q 11In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus's surname alludes to the mythical craftsman who built what?
The Labyrinth
The Labyrinth was the work of Daedalus, who then escaped his island prison on wings of his own making; Joyce's young artist, set on flying free of Dublin, is teased for his 'absurd name, an ancient Greek'.
Q 12In the 'Nestor' episode of Ulysses, headmaster Garrett Deasy asks Stephen to place a letter in the newspapers about what?
Foot-and-mouth disease
Foot-and-mouth disease: Stephen duly carries the long-winded letter to a newspaper office, and foresees the nickname it will earn him, 'the bullockbefriending bard'.
Q 13In the 'Calypso' episode of Ulysses, what does Leopold Bloom go out to buy for his breakfast?
Q 21Which Ulysses episode crosses Dublin in nineteen short scenes, ending with the viceroy's cavalcade?
Wandering Rocks
Wandering Rocks is the one adventure Homer's hero is warned about and steers clear of; Joyce writes it anyway, opening with a priest's walk and closing with the viceroy's carriage.
Q 22In the 'Cyclops' episode of Ulysses, the bigoted 'Citizen' is thought to satirise a founder of which organisation?
The Gaelic Athletic Association
The Gaelic Athletic Association's co-founder Michael Cusack is the model; when Bloom reminds him that his Saviour was a Jew, the Citizen hurls a biscuit tin at his head and misses.
Q 23Which episode of Ulysses, with Gerty MacDowell on Sandymount Strand, set off the 1920 US obscenity prosecution?
A pork kidney
A pork kidney: he likes mutton kidneys best, but Thursday is a bad day for them at his usual butcher, so he buys pork at Dlugacz's for threepence, fries it in butter and nearly lets it burn.
Q 14In Ulysses, the Blooms' home, the setting of the 'Calypso', 'Ithaca' and 'Penelope' episodes, is at what address?
7 Eccles Street
7 Eccles Street was a real Dublin house; when it was demolished its front door was rescued, and it now hangs in the James Joyce Centre.
Q 15In Ulysses, under what pseudonym does Leopold Bloom collect a love letter from 'Martha Clifford' at the post office?
Henry Flower
Henry Flower is a play on his own surname, and Martha joins in by pinning a flattened yellow flower inside her letter; he reads it in the street and tears up the envelope in an alley.
Q 16In Ulysses, Bloom buys a bar of what scented soap at Sweny's pharmacy in the 'Lotus Eaters' episode?
Lemon
Lemon: Bloom takes the fourpenny cake on credit, meaning to call back for a lotion he has ordered, then carries it in his pocket all day and never returns to pay.
Q 17In Ulysses, Bantam Lyons wrongly thinks Bloom is tipping him a racehorse with what name?
Throwaway
Throwaway: Bloom only says he was going to throw his newspaper away, but a 20-to-1 outsider of that name wins the Gold Cup that afternoon, and a pub full of drinkers decides he has cleaned up.
Q 18Whose funeral does Bloom attend in the 'Hades' episode of Ulysses?
Paddy Dignam's
Paddy Dignam's burial draws a stranger in a mackintosh; the reporter listing the mourners mishears Bloom and writes the man down as 'M'Intosh', and the book never says who he was.
Q 19In Ulysses, Bloom lunches at Davy Byrne's pub on a glass of burgundy and a sandwich of which cheese?
Gorgonzola
Gorgonzola: he had just walked out of the Burton restaurant, revolted by the sight of men bolting their food like animals, and settled for the quieter pub instead.
Q 20In Ulysses, Stephen expounds a biographical theory about which Shakespeare play in the National Library?
Hamlet
Hamlet, he argues, grew out of the adultery of Shakespeare's wife; asked at the end whether he believes his own theory, Stephen promptly answers no.
Nausicaa
Nausicaa ran in an American magazine in 1920; its two editors were found guilty and fined, the serial stopped, and the novel was in effect banned in the United States for more than a decade.
Q 24The 'Oxen of the Sun' episode of Ulysses, set in a maternity hospital, parodies the history of what?
The English language
The English language grows up on the page, from Anglo-Saxon alliteration through Malory, Bunyan and Dickens to modern slang, a development thought to match the nine months of a pregnancy.
Q 25The 'Circe' episode of Ulysses, set in Bella Cohen's brothel in Nighttown, is written in what form?
A play script
A play script, stage directions and all, lets the hallucinations run: Bloom is crowned ruler of 'Bloomusalem', then turned into a woman while the brothel-keeper becomes the bullying 'Mr Bello'.
Q 26The 'Ithaca' episode of Ulysses, reportedly Joyce's favourite, is written entirely in what form?
A catechism
A catechism of 309 questions and answers reports the homecoming with mock-scientific precision, down to the route of the tap water from its reservoir, yet many of its facts are wrong, apparently on purpose.
Q 27Molly Bloom's unpunctuated soliloquy, and with it Ulysses, ends on which word?
Yes
Yes closes eight unpunctuated paragraphs in which she drifts from that afternoon's lover back to the day Bloom proposed, and to the answer she gave him then.
Q 28In Ulysses, where was Molly Bloom born?
Gibraltar
Gibraltar, where her father was an Irish officer in the garrison, colours the book's last pages: her closing soliloquy drifts back to her girlhood there before it reaches Bloom's proposal.
Q 29In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom's father, Rudolf Virág, emigrated to Dublin from which country?
Hungary
Hungary: his fictional birthplace, the town of Szombathely, has taken the novel to heart and has held Bloomsday celebrations of its own since 1994.
Q 30In Ulysses, Bloom's son Rudy, whose death still haunts him, lived for how long?
11 days
11 days: Rudy died in January 1894, and at the end of the brothel episode, ten years on, Bloom sees a vision of him as a fairy boy of eleven.