Fairy Tales
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250 free Fairy Tales trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
59 free fairy tale trivia questions with answers. Every fairy tale you were read as a child has a stranger, older version underneath it: a Cinderella from Roman Egypt whose sandal was stolen by an eagle, a Sleeping Beauty who was already a mother when she woke, a Snow White whose stepmother danced to death in red-hot iron shoes, and a Little Mermaid who never got the prince. This quiz walks through the whole canon: who the Grimms, Perrault and Andersen were and when they published, the Aarne-Thompson index that catalogues the tales, and the details behind Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, Rapunzel, The Frog Prince, Puss in Boots, Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Jack and the Beanstalk, Goldilocks, The Three Little Pigs, Pinocchio, the Pied Piper, Aladdin and Andersen's Little Mermaid, Ugly Duckling, Emperor's New Clothes, Princess and the Pea and Snow Queen. A final round covers the fairies themselves: where the word comes from, cold iron and changelings, fairy rings, the Cottingley photographs that fooled Arthur Conan Doyle, Tinker Bell, the tooth fairy and the Sugar Plum Fairy. Every answer was checked against a documented source and the citation sits under each explanation.
30 of 250 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the Grimms' 1812 Rapunzel, what gives away the prince's secret visits?
Her tight clothes
Her tight clothes: she innocently asks why they no longer fit. Later editions hid the pregnancy and had her blurt out instead that the old woman is harder to pull up than the prince.
Q 02Which massive scholarly project did the Grimms begin in 1838 and leave unfinished at their deaths?
A German dictionary
The Grimms began the Deutsches Wörterbuch, a German dictionary, in 1838; other scholars completed it only in 1961. Jacob also gave his name to Grimm's law.
Q 03Charles Perrault's 1697 collection of Cinderella, Puss in Boots and Sleeping Beauty carried what subtitle?
Tales of Mother Goose
Tales of Mother Goose, Contes de ma mère l'Oye, was the name on the frontispiece; Perrault would not sign the book himself, and it appeared as the work of 'P. Darmancour', his young son Pierre.
Q 04Hans Christian Andersen was born in 1805 in which Danish city?
Odense
Odense was his birthplace; still a boy, he left for Copenhagen hoping to become an actor, and it was a director of the Royal Theatre there who raised the money to send him to school instead.
Q 05Which French writer, a contemporary of Charles Perrault, coined the term 'fairy tale' with her 1697 collection Les Contes des fées?
Madame d'Aulnoy
Madame d'Aulnoy gave the genre its name with that title; years earlier she is said to have fled arrest after a failed plot to have her husband condemned for treason.
Q 06A popular theory holds that Cinderella's glass slipper was a mistake for 'vair', a French word for what?
Squirrel fur
Squirrel fur, vair, sounds just like verre, glass; Balzac asserted the mix-up in a novel, but Perrault's own title says 'pantoufle de verre' and no earlier fur-slipper version has ever been identified.
Q 07In Strabo's tale of Rhodopis, often called the earliest Cinderella story, what steals her sandal?
An eagle
An eagle snatches the sandal while Rhodopis bathes and drops it in the lap of the Egyptian king at Memphis, who sends men across the country to find its owner.
Q 08Which detail did Charles Perrault add to the Cinderella story in his 1697 version?
The pumpkin coach
The pumpkin coach was Perrault's own touch, like the glass of the slippers; the stepmother, the feast and a lost shoe were already in an Italian version printed in 1634.
Q 09In the Grimms' 1812 first edition of Snow White, who was the villain who wanted the girl dead?
Her own mother
Her own mother orders the killing in the 1812 text, telling the huntsman to bring back the girl's lungs and liver as proof; the 1819 edition recast her as a stepmother.
Q 10How is the wicked queen punished at the end of the Grimms' Snow White?
Dancing in red-hot iron shoes till death
Dancing in red-hot iron shoes till death is her sentence at Snow White's wedding, the shoes carried in with tongs from the coals; Disney's 1937 film has her fall from a cliff instead.
Q 11A 1912 play named the seven dwarfs Blick, Flick, Glick, Snick, Plick, Whick and Quee; where did it open?
On Broadway
On Broadway, at Winthrop Ames's Little Theatre; its star Marguerite Clark repeated the role in a 1916 silent film, which a teenage Walt Disney saw and later cited as a reason he chose Snow White.
Q 12In Perrault's original Little Red Riding Hood, what happens after the wolf eats the girl?
Nothing; the story ends
Nothing; the story ends there, with the girl eaten and no rescue; the Grimm version brings in a huntsman who cuts the sleeping wolf open and lets her and her grandmother out alive.
Q 13In the Grimm tale, Red Riding Hood's grandmother lures a second wolf off the roof into a trough of what?
Q 21Perrault's Bluebeard is a wealthy man with what habit?
Murdering his wives
Murdering his wives is Bluebeard's secret: behind a forbidden door his new bride finds the bodies, and her brothers ride up to kill him just as her sister Anne spots them from the tower.
Q 22Which French novelist first wrote down Beauty and the Beast in 1740?
Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve
Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve published it anonymously and at novel length, inside La Jeune Américaine et les contes marins; the short tale most people know is a later abridgement.
Q 23The ogre's cry 'Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman' comes from which tale?
Sausage water
Sausage water did it: the grandmother had the girl fill a stone trough with the water from boiling sausages, and the wolf, craning after the smell, slid off the roof and drowned.
Q 14The witch's house in Hansel and Gretel is described in the Grimm tale as made of what?
Bread, cake and sugar
Bread, cake and sugar: the walls were bread, the roof cake and the windows clear sugar; the famous gingerbread came from later adaptations, not from the Grimms' text.
Q 15Before the apple, the Grimms' wicked queen tries to kill Snow White with tight bodice laces and what else?
A poisoned comb
A poisoned comb is her second weapon: the dwarfs get home in time to cut the laces and then to pull out the comb, but the apple leaves nothing for them to find.
Q 16In the Grimms' final 1857 edition, how does Rumpelstiltskin meet his end after his name is guessed?
He tears himself in two
He tears himself in two: stamping his right foot deep into the ground in rage, he grabs the left with both hands and rips himself up the middle; in the 1812 edition he simply ran away angrily.
Q 17The English cousin of Rumpelstiltskin, published by Joseph Jacobs in 1890, is called what?
Tom Tit Tot
Tom Tit Tot, a Suffolk tale, opens Jacobs's English Fairy Tales; the imp gives himself away by singing 'Nimmy nimmy not, my name's Tom Tit Tot' as he spins.
Q 18In the Grimms' Rapunzel, which plant does the pregnant wife crave from the witch's garden?
Rampion
Rampion, a bellflower once grown for its salad leaves and roots, is one plant the German word Rapunzel names; the French Persinette and Italian Petrosinella are named for parsley instead.
Q 19Instead of a kiss, how does the princess break the spell in the Grimms' Frog King?
Hurls him against a wall
Hurls him against a wall: disgusted that the frog wants to share her bed, she throws him with all her might and he lands a prince; the kiss seems to have arrived later, in English retellings.
Q 20In Puss in Boots, the cat claims his master, a miller's youngest son, is a nobleman with what title?
The Marquis of Carabas
Puss tells the king his master is the Marquis of Carabas, an invented title; the eldest brother got the mill, the middle one the donkey and the youngest only the cat.
Jack and the Beanstalk
Jack and the Beanstalk made the cry famous, but the rhyme is older than the printed tale: in King Lear, Edgar says 'Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man.'
Q 24Before Goldilocks, who broke into the bears' house in Robert Southey's 1837 'Story of the Three Bears'?
A rude old woman
A rude old woman was Southey's intruder, and his three bears were bachelors, not a family; a publisher turned her into a pretty little girl about a dozen years later, and the name Goldilocks came later still.
Q 25In a version of The Three Little Pigs printed in 1853, who lives in the houses?
Pixies
Pixies own the houses, of wood, stone and iron, and a fox takes the wolf's part: he pulls down the first two and eats the owners, but the iron house beats him.
Q 26What is forbidden on the Hamelin street the Pied Piper's children are said to have left by?
Music and dancing
Music and dancing are banned on Bungelosenstrasse, the 'drumless street'; the Grimms recorded that even a bridal procession's musicians had to stop playing as they crossed it, in memory of 130 lost children.
Q 27Which Arabian Nights tale did Antoine Galland add after hearing it from a Syrian storyteller in Paris?
Aladdin
Aladdin came from Hanna Diyab, a young Maronite from Aleppo who met Galland in Paris in 1709; no Arabic text of the tale older than Galland's French version has been found.
Q 28In Andersen's original mermaid tale, what does the sea witch take in exchange for giving her legs?
Her tongue
Her tongue is the price: the sea witch cuts it out, leaving her mute, and warns that every step on her new legs will feel like treading on sharp knives.
Q 29At the end of Andersen's The Little Mermaid, the heroine's body dissolves into what?
Sea foam
Sea foam is all a mermaid leaves behind after her 300 years, having no immortal soul; Andersen lets his heroine rise from it as a daughter of the air, with a chance to earn one.
Q 30The Ugly Duckling turns out to be what kind of bird?
A swan
A swan: after a winter alone, the outcast swims up to the royal birds expecting them to kill him, bows his head, and sees his own reflection in the water.