Finland Trivia
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58 free Finland trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
56 free Finland trivia questions with answers. How well do you really know Finland? This quiz covers the whole country, not just the postcard version: the geography of a land with 180,000 lakes and the world's largest archipelago, the long centuries under Sweden and Russia, the fight for independence, the Winter War, and the modern nation that keeps topping the World Happiness Report. You will meet the people and things Finland gave the world: Nokia phones and the Linux kernel, the Moomins and the Kalevala, Sibelius and Lordi, Marimekko prints and orange-handled Fiskars scissors, plus the sauna, salmiakki, Karelian pasties and a wife-carrying championship paid out in beer. Questions run from easy warm-ups to genuinely hard ones about Åland, the Sámi languages and Aalto's architecture. Every answer has been checked against a source you can read yourself, mostly Wikipedia and official Finnish sites, so you can settle arguments with confidence. Play alone or use the set for a pub quiz, classroom or Nordic-themed party night.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Finland shares land borders with Sweden, Norway and which other country?
Russia
Russia's border with Finland runs about 1,340 km, mostly through forest; in 2023 Finland began building a fence along some 200 km of it.
Q 02Which two languages are Finland's official national languages?
Finnish and Swedish
Finnish and Swedish are both national languages under the constitution, although Swedish is the mother tongue of only about 5% of Finns.
Q 03Lake Saimaa, Finland's largest lake, is the only home of which endangered animal?
A freshwater ringed seal
A freshwater ringed seal, the Saimaa seal has been cut off from the sea since the last ice age; limits on net fishing lifted its numbers from about 150 in the 1980s to roughly 500 by 2024.
Q 04Which Finnish company, rooted in an 1865 mill, was the world's largest mobile phone vendor from 1998?
Nokia
The company took its name from a second mill by the town of Nokia in 1871, and spent decades making rubber boots, tyres and cables before phones.
Q 05What did Norwegians propose giving Finland for its centenary?
A mountain peak
A mountain peak: Finland's highest point, 1,324 m up Halti, is only the shoulder of a fell whose summit lies in Norway, but Norway's prime minister ruled the gift out on constitutional grounds.
Q 06What do Finns celebrate on 6 December?
Independence Day
Independence Day marks 6 December 1917, when parliament adopted the declaration drawn up by Svinhufvud's senate, ending 108 years as a grand duchy under the tsars.
Q 07Which arm of the Baltic Sea separates Finland's west coast from Sweden?
Gulf of Bothnia
Gulf of Bothnia water is so diluted by rivers that pike and perch thrive at its northern end, and being nearly fresh it freezes over for months each winter.
Q 08Finnish Lapland promotes itself as the official hometown of which famous figure, with a village in Rovaniemi?
Santa Claus
Santa Claus Village grew up on the Arctic Circle around a cabin built in 1950 for a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt, and Santa has kept an office there since 1985.
Q 09In December 2020, UNESCO added Finland's sauna tradition to which of its lists?
Intangible Cultural Heritage
Intangible Cultural Heritage status recognised a custom so central that some older Finns were born in the family sauna, a sterile room with hot water to hand.
Q 10Which bat-and-ball game, pitched straight up, is called Finland's national sport?
Pesäpallo
Pesäpallo was devised by Lauri Pihkala after he saw baseball in the United States; the vertical pitch makes the ball easy to hit, so games turn on placement and running.
Q 11By what nickname is Teemu Selänne, the top-scoring player from Finland in NHL history, known?
The Finnish Flash
The Finnish Flash was the nickname Selänne earned for his speed after scoring 76 goals as a Winnipeg Jets rookie in 1992–93, an NHL record for a first-year player.
Q 12Which organisation did Finland join on 4 April 2023?
NATO
NATO admitted Finland as its 31st member less than a year after parliament voted 188 to 8 to apply, ending decades of military non-alignment.
Q 13What was Finland's currency before it adopted the euro?
The markka
The markka was introduced in 1860 while Finland was a grand duchy under the tsar, and in 1865 it was tied to silver, separating it from the rouble and bolstering Finnish autonomy.
Q 21Which future first lady wore dresses by the Finnish label Marimekko during the 1960 presidential campaign?
Jacqueline Kennedy
Jacqueline Kennedy's loose cotton shifts, one worn on a 1960 Sports Illustrated cover, brought the then little-known Finnish label worldwide attention.
Q 22Which marshal commanded Finland's forces in the Winter War and later served as the country's president?
Gustaf Mannerheim
Gustaf Mannerheim had spent 30 years as an officer in the tsar's army before leading Finland's defence; he became president in 1944 to take the country out of the war.
Q 23By what nickname is Finnish Winter War sniper Simo Häyhä best known?
The White Death
Q 14Which monster-masked rock band won the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest for Finland?
Lordi
Frontman Mr Lordi makes the band's costumes himself and redesigns them for every album; the winning song was Hard Rock Hallelujah.
Q 15Which Finnish writer and illustrator created the Moomins?
Tove Jansson
Tove Jansson said the first Moomin was the ugliest creature she could draw, sketched on an outhouse wall during an argument with her brother; the first book followed in 1945.
Q 16Which Finnish studio created Angry Birds, the 2009 game that saved the company from bankruptcy?
Rovio Entertainment
Rovio Entertainment had made 51 games without a hit of its own and was close to bankruptcy before Angry Birds, drawn by designer Jaakko Iisalo, arrived in December 2009; Sega bought the studio in 2023.
Q 17Which Finnish-born software engineer began a free operating-system kernel as a student in 1991 and later created Git?
Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds began Linux in 1991 as a 21-year-old student after buying an Intel 386 PC, wrote Git in 2005 to manage kernel development, and shared the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize.
Q 18Which Sibelius tone poem began as the finale of an 1899 pageant staged in protest at press censorship?
Finlandia
Finlandia grew from the pageant finale 'Finland Awakes', revised in 1900; inside the tsar's empire it then had to be billed under the covert title 'Impromptu' to get past the censors.
Q 19What is Finland's national epic, compiled by Elias Lönnrot and published in 1835?
The Kalevala
The Kalevala was pieced together by Lönnrot, a country doctor, from folk songs he collected on long journeys through eastern Finland and Karelia; his expanded 1849 edition is the one read today.
Q 20Which Finnish company, founded in 1649, is best known for its orange-handled scissors?
Fiskars
Fiskars began as an ironworks chartered in 1649 and made its first orange-handled scissors in 1967, after prototypes in black, red, green and orange were put to a staff vote.
Häyhä was dubbed The White Death after reportedly killing around 500 enemy soldiers in under 100 days of the Winter War; he preferred iron sights so his head stayed lower and no lens could glint.
Q 24What did Finns sarcastically call Soviet cluster bombs, mocking the foreign minister's claim they were dropping food?
Molotov bread baskets
Molotov bread baskets mocked the Soviet foreign minister's claim that his bombers were dropping food; the Finns then named their petrol bombs Molotov cocktails, 'a drink to go with the food'.
Q 25In 1906 Finland became the first country in Europe to do what?
Grant universal suffrage
Grant universal suffrage is what the 1906 reform did, making Finnish women the first in Europe with the vote; in 1907 voters elected 19 of them, the world's first female members of parliament.
Q 26Which Finnish city hosted the 1952 Summer Olympics?
Helsinki
Helsinki staged the 1952 Summer Olympics after its 1940 Games were cancelled by war; Paavo Nurmi lit the stadium cauldron at the opening ceremony.
Q 27Which autonomous, demilitarised island region of Finland elects its own parliament, the Lagting?
Åland
Åland stayed Finnish in 1921 when the League of Nations settled a dispute over the islands, on condition that they keep wide self-rule and remain demilitarised.
Q 28What did nine-time Olympic champion Paavo Nurmi carry as he raced?
A stopwatch
A stopwatch let Nurmi run to an even pace instead of racing his rivals; at the 1924 Paris Games he won the 1,500 m and 5,000 m golds within two hours.
Q 29Kimi Räikkönen won the 2007 Formula One World Drivers' Championship driving for which team?
Ferrari
Räikkönen took the 2007 title in his first season with Ferrari, beating McLaren's Alonso and Hamilton by a single point with victory in the Brazilian finale.
Q 30Which bird, Finland's national bird since 1981, appears on the Finnish one-euro coin?
Whooper swan
Whooper swan numbers fell so low that fewer than twenty pairs bred in Finland by the 1950s; the bird recovered as an emblem of the young conservation movement and now flies on the one-euro coin.