Folklore Trivia
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172 free Folklore trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
47 free folklore trivia questions with answers. This folklore trivia quiz travels the world's folk tales and legends: Slavic witches in chicken-legged huts, Irish fairies who cobble shoes, the giant lumberjack an ad man invented, the steel-driver who raced a machine, the piper who emptied Hamelin, the spider who bought all the stories from the sky god, the foxes of Japan and the horned companion of Saint Nicholas. It also covers the scholars, from William Thoms coining the word to the Grimms and the Aarne-Thompson index. It works for a literature class, a library trivia night, a Halloween party that wants more than horror, or a family quiz where the kids know the tales and the adults know the history. Easy questions for anyone who grew up on fairy tales; harder ones on dates, sources and origins. Every answer was checked against encyclopedic sources before it went live, and each question explains itself as soon as you pick.
30 of 172 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who coined the word 'folklore' in 1846?
William Thoms
William Thoms coined 'Folk-Lore' in an 1846 letter to The Athenaeum to replace 'popular antiquities'; the letter grew into a regular column, and he went on to found the journal Notes and Queries.
Q 02Which American folklorist expanded Antti Aarne's 1910 index of folktale types into the standard reference?
Stith Thompson
Stith Thompson translated Aarne's index into English and twice enlarged it, so that scholars anywhere can file a tale such as Cinderella under one shared type.
Q 03Folklorists call playground rhymes and counting-out games 'childlore' because they are passed on by whom?
Children to other children
Children to other children: the rhymes, dares and rules of tag cross the playground with no adult teaching them, the world Iona and Peter Opie recorded in The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959).
Q 04In later editions, the Grimms turned Snow White's cruel mother into what?
A stepmother
A stepmother replaced the girl's own mother, who is the jealous villain of the 1812 first edition; the brothers made the same switch in Hansel and Gretel as they revised the tales over seven editions.
Q 05Which of these fairy tales is by Hans Christian Andersen rather than from the Grimms' collection?
The Little Mermaid
The Little Mermaid is Hans Christian Andersen's own 1837 tale; in his ending she loses the prince and dissolves into sea foam, while the other three all come from the Grimms' collection.
Q 06Paul Bunyan is customarily accompanied by which animal?
Babe the Blue Ox
Babe the Blue Ox is Paul Bunyan's giant working companion, and in the tall tales the pair's footprints filled with water to make Minnesota's 10,000 lakes.
Q 07Paul Bunyan was popularised by a 1916 promotional pamphlet for which kind of business?
A lumber company
A lumber company had its adman William Laughead write the pamphlet, and he turned the loggers' oral tales into the firm's advertising mascot.
Q 08Which term did folklorist Richard Dorson coin for invented traditions like the popular Paul Bunyan tales?
Fakelore
Fakelore was Richard Dorson's 1950 coinage for manufactured tales passed off as genuine tradition; he aimed it first at a popular Paul Bunyan book, then at Pecos Bill.
Q 09In Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga's forest hut stands on what?
Chicken legs
Baba Yaga's hut stands on chicken legs and turns to face whoever commands it; she can be villain or helper depending on the tale.
Q 10In Russian folktales, Baba Yaga flies through the air riding in what?
A mortar
A mortar carries Baba Yaga through the air: she drives it on with the pestle and sweeps away her tracks behind her with a broom.
Q 11What is the leprechaun's principal occupation in Irish folklore?
Making and mending shoes
The leprechaun is a solitary fairy cobbler, forever making and mending shoes; the tapping of his hammer is said to give away his hiding place.
Q 12Before the 20th century, what colour was the leprechaun generally said to wear?
Red
Red was the leprechaun's colour in 19th-century accounts: Samuel Lover gave him a red coat in 1831, and Yeats wrote that solitary fairies wear red, the trooping ones green.
Q 13John Henry, the American folk hero, is said to have raced and beaten what?
A steam-powered rock drill
Q 21Robin Hood's outlaws traditionally wear a green cloth named after which English city?
Lincoln
Lincoln green came from the city's dyers, who coloured wool blue with woad and then overdyed it yellow; the outlaws are 'clothed in Lyncolne grene' in the 15th-century Gest of Robyn Hode.
Q 22In the Robin Hood legend, which absent king does Prince John try to usurp?
Richard
Richard the Lionheart was away on crusade and then held prisoner for ransom, but he joined the legend late: the earliest ballads name the king only as Edward.
Q 23Anansi, the trickster of Akan folklore in Ghana, is most commonly depicted as what animal?
A spider
A spider is Anansi's usual shape, sometimes with a human head; the tales crossed the Atlantic with enslaved West Africans, and in the Caribbean he is still told of as Anancy.
John Henry beat the steam-powered rock drill through the rock but died with his hammer in his hand, a contest told in dozens of ballad versions.
Q 14The Big Bend Tunnel traditionally linked to John Henry's contest is near Talcott in which state?
West Virginia
West Virginia claims the legend at Talcott, where a statue of John Henry stands near the Big Bend Tunnel, though tunnels in Virginia and Alabama have also been put forward as the site of the contest.
Q 15What was Johnny Appleseed's real name?
John Chapman
John Chapman, born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1774, was a missionary as well as a nurseryman, carrying Swedenborgian writings to the pioneers along with his apple seeds.
Q 16Apples grown from Johnny Appleseed's seeds were mostly good for making what?
Hard cider
Hard cider: apples grown from seed vary wildly and are rarely good eating, but they press well, and cider was the frontier's everyday drink.
Q 17In the popular image of Johnny Appleseed, what does he wear on his head?
A tin cooking pot
A tin cooking pot is the popular image: an 1871 Harper's article said he wore a tin vessel that served as both cap and mush pot as he planted nurseries from Pennsylvania to Indiana.
Q 18The Pied Piper legend is set in Hamelin, a town in which country?
Germany
Germany's Hamelin still shows an inscription dating the loss of 130 children to 26 June 1284; one leading theory is that a recruiter drew the town's young away to settle new lands in the east.
Q 19The Pied Piper led Hamelin's children away after the town refused to do what?
Pay him
Pay him: the town broke its promise once the rats were gone, yet the rats joined the story only in the 16th century; the earliest records speak simply of 130 children lost in 1284.
Q 20What is banned on Hamelin's Bungelosenstrasse, said to be the last place the children were seen?
Music and dancing
Music and dancing are kept off the Bungelosenstrasse, the 'drumless street', out of respect for the lost children; the Pied Piper House there carries the old inscription about the piper.
Q 24What does Anansi win from sky god Nyame by capturing dangerous creatures?
All the world's stories
All the world's stories were the sky god's until Anansi paid his price, a great snake, a big cat and a swarm of stinging insects, each caught by a trick; that is why they are told as Anansi stories.
Q 25In Japanese folklore, a kitsune is a spirit taking the form of which animal?
A fox
A fox: kitsune are tricksters said to live for centuries, growing more powerful as they age and often taking the shape of a woman to fool the unwary.
Q 26In Japan, rain falling from a clear sky is said to mean that kitsune are holding what?
A wedding
A wedding: a sunshower is called 'kitsune no yomeiri', and one old explanation is that the spirits make the rain fall so that no human will climb up and see the bridal procession.
Q 27In Irish folklore, what does a banshee's wail foretell?
A death in the family
A death in the family is what her wail foretells; Yeats called her an attendant fairy of the old Irish families and said the mourners' keen at funerals imitates her cry.
Q 28In Jewish folklore, a golem is a being fashioned from what?
Clay or mud
Clay or mud is the golem's usual stuff; in the best-known legend a rabbi shaped one from riverbank clay and brought it to life to defend his community from attack.
Q 29In some golem tales, erasing one letter from the word on its forehead leaves what?
'Met', meaning death
Erasing the initial aleph from emet (truth) leaves 'met', meaning death, which deactivates the golem; the word golem itself appears once in the Bible, in Psalm 139.
Q 30La Llorona, whose name means 'the Weeping Woman', is said to roam near what?
Bodies of water
La Llorona wanders beside bodies of water weeping for the children she drowned; the tale is told to warn and frighten, and some scholars link her to the Aztec goddess Cihuacoatl.