Fantasy Trivia
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100 free Fantasy trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
47 free Fantasy trivia questions with answers. Fantasy runs from Victorian pioneers to BookTok bestsellers, and this quiz covers the whole shelf. It starts with the founders: George MacDonald, Lord Dunsany, William Morris, Baum's Oz, then Tolkien's Hobbit and Rings, Lewis's Narnia and the Inklings. Then the modern epics: Le Guin's Earthsea, Jordan's Wheel of Time and its Sanderson ending, Martin's Westeros, Pratchett's Discworld, Rowling's 600 million copies, Pullman, Gaiman's Sandman and American Gods. Sword and sorcery gets its due with Conan, Elric and Fritz Leiber's coinage; so do Dungeons & Dragons, The Princess Bride, Peter Jackson's eleven Oscars, the World Fantasy Award's Lovecraft bust and N. K. Jemisin's Hugo hat-trick. The new wave is here too: Sanderson's Kickstarter, the Cosmere, Sarah J. Maas, Fourth Wing, romantasy, The Witcher, Howl's Moving Castle and Wicked. Easy questions suit anyone who has seen the films; harder ones will test lifelong readers. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the books and authors, and the source line appears under each question after you answer.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which book began as a scribble on an exam paper?
The Hobbit
The Hobbit grew from one sentence Tolkien wrote on a blank page while marking exams, 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit'; his publisher's ten-year-old son later read the finished story and approved it.
Q 02Which dwarf leads the company that takes Bilbo Baggins to the Lonely Mountain?
Thorin Oakenshield
Thorin Oakenshield and twelve other dwarves set out to win back their treasure from the dragon Smaug; the wizard Gandalf persuades the unwilling Bilbo to go with them.
Q 03The Lord of the Rings was published in three volumes for what reason?
Economics
Economics drove the split: Allen & Unwin expected to lose money on a fairy tale a thousand pages long, so it came out in three parts across 1954-55, though Tolkien wrote it as one novel, not a trilogy.
Q 04Which Tolkien book, published in 1977, tells the ancient history behind Middle-earth?
The Silmarillion
The Silmarillion occupied Tolkien for more than fifty years without ever being finished; his son Christopher assembled it from the drafts, and it appeared four years after his death.
Q 05Where was J. R. R. Tolkien born?
Bloemfontein, South Africa
Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State (now South Africa), on 3 January 1892; his mother brought him to England when he was three.
Q 06Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were both members of which Oxford literary group?
The Inklings
The Inklings were an informal Oxford literary circle of the 1930s and 1940s that met in C. S. Lewis's Magdalen College rooms and at the Eagle and Child pub; Tolkien read Lord of the Rings drafts there.
Q 07Which Pevensie sibling is the first to step through the wardrobe into Narnia?
Lucy
Lucy, the youngest, finds Narnia while exploring the house and takes tea with the faun Mr Tumnus, who admits he had meant to hand her to the White Witch; back home, her siblings do not believe her.
Q 08Which Narnia novel, the sixth published, tells how Narnia was created?
The Magician's Nephew
The Magician's Nephew (1955) is a prequel showing Narnia's creation; recent editions number it first, putting the seven books in story order rather than the order Lewis published them.
Q 09Which author began the Earthsea books with A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote A Wizard of Earthsea because a small-press publisher asked her to try a book for older children; The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore followed within four years.
Q 10Which novel opens The Wheel of Time?
The Eye of the World
The Eye of the World (1990) began a series that grew to 14 volumes; Robert Jordan died in 2007 before he could finish it, and the last books were completed by another writer.
Q 11Who finished The Wheel of Time after Robert Jordan's death?
Brandon Sanderson
Brandon Sanderson finished The Wheel of Time from Jordan's notes after Jordan's 2007 death, splitting the planned twelfth and final book into The Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light.
Q 12The author of Mistborn raised $41.7 million on Kickstarter in 2022 to publish what?
Four secret novels
Four secret novels, written during the pandemic, were the prize: the campaign asked for $1 million, passed that within a day and ended with 185,341 backers, the most-funded Kickstarter to that date.
Q 13Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive are set in which shared universe?
The Cosmere
Q 21Which company published Neil Gaiman's The Sandman from 1989?
DC Comics
DC Comics published all 75 issues, the later ones under its Vertigo imprint; Gaiman had settled on the story's ending from the outset and closed the series there.
Q 22Michael Moorcock's albino anti-hero Elric wields which soul-drinking sword?
Stormbringer
Stormbringer feeds the sickly Elric the strength he lacks by drinking souls, but the black sword has a will of its own: it takes everyone close to him and, in the end, Elric's own soul.
Q 23Robert E. Howard's Conan made his debut in 1932 in which pulp magazine?
Weird Tales
Weird Tales ran 'The Phoenix on the Sword' in December 1932; Howard had made it by rewriting an unsold story about an earlier hero, King Kull.
The Cosmere links Mistborn, The Stormlight Archive, Elantris and Warbreaker, each set on a different world; the wandering storyteller Hoid turns up across them.
Q 14George R. R. Martin began A Game of Thrones in 1991 after years spent writing for which medium?
Television
Television had employed Martin on The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast; tired of budgets that made him cut characters and battles, he went back to novels, where his story could be as big as he liked.
Q 15A Song of Ice and Fire is set on which two continents?
Westeros and Essos
Westeros and Essos carry the story: rival families fight for the Iron Throne in the west while the exiled Daenerys Targaryen gathers her strength in the east; the world itself has no official name.
Q 16Which novel opened Pratchett's Discworld?
The Colour of Magic
The Colour of Magic began a run of 41 Discworld novels, the last published after Pratchett's death in 2015; it ends on a literal cliffhanger, with the wizard Rincewind falling off the edge of the world.
Q 17The Discworld rests on the backs of four elephants standing on what?
A giant turtle
A giant turtle, Great A'Tuin, swims through space with the elephants and the disc on its back; in the first novel, astronomers plan to launch a capsule over the world's edge to find out whether it is male or female.
Q 18Which comic novel did Pratchett co-write with Neil Gaiman in 1990?
Good Omens
Good Omens (1990) was plotted in long daily phone calls, with Pratchett and Gaiman posting floppy disks back and forth; by the end, Gaiman said, neither was sure who had written what.
Q 19Which London publisher took on the first Harry Potter book after a string of others had turned it down?
Bloomsbury
Bloomsbury said yes after its chief executive's eight-year-old daughter, Alice, read the opening chapter and judged it 'so much better than anything else'.
Q 20Philip Pullman's Northern Lights was published in North America under what title?
The Golden Compass
The Golden Compass came from a mix-up: Pullman's working title for the trilogy was The Golden Compasses, Milton's circle-drawing instrument, and his US publisher took it to mean Lyra's alethiometer and kept it.
Q 24Who coined the term 'sword and sorcery' in a 1961 fanzine?
Fritz Leiber
Fritz Leiber offered 'sword-and-sorcery' in a 1961 fanzine, just as Michael Moorcock was asking fans to name the kind of adventure Robert E. Howard wrote; Leiber wrote it himself in his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales.
Q 25William Goldman's The Princess Bride is framed as an abridgement of a book by which fictional author?
S. Morgenstern
S. Morgenstern is Goldman's invention, like the 'original' he claims to abridge; readers who wrote to the publisher for a missing reunion scene got a letter about legal trouble with the Morgenstern estate instead.
Q 26Dungeons & Dragons was first published in 1974 by which company?
TSR
TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) was set up in 1973 by Gary Gygax and Don Kaye because no publisher would take the game Gygax was developing with Dave Arneson; Wizards of the Coast bought the company in 1997.
Q 27Which film swept its 11 Oscar nominations?
The Return of the King
The Return of the King won every Oscar it was up for, the biggest clean sweep the awards had seen, yet not one of its 11 nominations was for acting.
Q 28Until 2015 the World Fantasy Award trophy was a bust of which writer?
H. P. Lovecraft
The World Fantasy Award trophy was a Gahan Wilson bust of H. P. Lovecraft from the first awards in 1975 until it was retired after 2015 amid criticism of Lovecraft's racism.
Q 29Which author's Broken Earth trilogy won the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years running?
N. K. Jemisin
N. K. Jemisin won in 2016, 2017 and 2018 for The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky; after the first book, readers' Patreon pledges let her quit her job as a counsellor and write full time.
Q 30Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, drawing on Welsh myth, consists of how many books?
Five
The Chronicles of Prydain run five books, from The Book of Three (1964) to The High King (1968), which won the 1969 Newbery Medal.