Gulliver's Travels Trivia
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57 free Gulliver's Travels trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Gulliver's Travels trivia quiz takes all four voyages in turn. Lilliput brings the six-inch people, the egg-cracking schism, the high heels and low heels, the captured fleet and the palace fire put out in the least dignified way possible. Brobdingnag brings the 72-foot farmer, Glumdalclitch, the travelling box and the eagle. The third voyage covers the flying island, the sunbeam-from-cucumber projectors of Lagado, the ghosts of Glubbdubdrib and the immortal struldbrugs, and the fourth brings the horses and the Yahoos. The rest is about Swift and the book's afterlife: why the manuscript was copied in another hand, the publisher who cut the dangerous bits, the Scriblerus Club, Pope's verses, Thackeray's outrage, big-endian and little-endian, Miyazaki's flying castle, Telemann's suite and Jack Black. There are questions on Stella, Ménière's disease and the deanery of St Patrick's for good measure. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the novel, its author, Lilliput, Laputa, Brobdingnag and the Yahoos, and each explanation adds one detail worth passing on. It suits book clubs, students of satire and anyone who has ever cracked an egg at the wrong end.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How do candidates win high office at Lilliput's court?
Rope-dancing
Rope-dancing: whoever jumps highest on the rope without falling gets the vacant post, and sitting ministers are often ordered to repeat the feat to prove they have not lost the knack.
Q 02What is Gulliver's first name?
Lemuel
The narrator is Lemuel Gulliver; the original title page presents him as the author, and the full title begins Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, In Four Parts.
Q 03What was Gulliver's profession before he became a ship's captain?
Surgeon
Surgeon: Gulliver trained under a London surgeon and studied physic at Leiden, and he returned to sea as a ship's surgeon when his London practice began to fail.
Q 04What is the name of the ship wrecked in a storm on Gulliver's first voyage?
The Antelope
The Antelope was driven onto a rock in a storm north-west of Van Diemen's Land and split; the boat Gulliver escaped in capsized, and he alone swam to shore.
Q 05What have the Lilliputians done to Gulliver by the time he wakes?
Tied him down
Tied him down: slender cords pin his arms, legs and even his hair to the ground, and when he struggles the six-inch archers loose a volley of arrows that prick like needles.
Q 06What trivial question divides Lilliput's two warring religious sects?
Which end of a boiled egg to crack open
The sects fight over which end of a boiled egg to crack open: after a young prince cut his finger on the big end, an edict ordered every egg broken at the small end.
Q 07What distinguishes Lilliput's two political parties, a parody of the Tories and Whigs?
The height of their heels
The height of their heels: the Tramecksan wear them high and the Slamecksan low, while the emperor's heir wears one of each and hobbles as a result.
Q 08Which rival island nation's fleet does Gulliver capture for Lilliput?
Blefuscu
Gulliver wades the 800-yard channel and tows away the fleet of Blefuscu; his refusal to help reduce the island to a province then turns the emperor against him.
Q 09How does Gulliver put out a fire in the royal palace of Lilliput?
He urinates on it
He urinates on it and the fire is out in three minutes, but making water in the palace is a capital crime, and the disgusted empress never forgives him.
Q 10What punishment is Gulliver sentenced to in Lilliput before he escapes?
Blinding
Blinding was urged by his friend Reldresal as a mercy, since others on the council wanted him killed; warned in secret, Gulliver slipped away to the rival island first.
Q 11Which Lilliputian official is usually read as a caricature of Sir Robert Walpole?
Flimnap, the lord high treasurer
Flimnap, the lord high treasurer, is often read as Walpole; long Gulliver's secret enemy, he turns openly cold after court gossip that his own wife has paid the visitor a private call.
Q 12What is the name of the land of giants Gulliver reaches on his second voyage?
Brobdingnag
Brobdingnag gave English the adjective Brobdingnagian, meaning gigantic; Gulliver is stranded there when his shipmates row off in terror from a giant wading after them.
Q 13In the land of giants, which household pests the size of large dogs attack Gulliver on the farmer's bed?
Rats
Q 21On the island of Glubbdubdrib, whom does Gulliver converse with?
The ghosts of historical figures
The ghosts of historical figures are raised by the island's governor, a sorcerer: Gulliver meets Caesar, Brutus and Homer, and hears Aristotle admit his mistakes to Descartes.
Q 22What are the struldbrugs of Luggnagg?
People who are immortal but still age
People who are immortal but still age, the struldbrugs lose teeth, memory and friends, and at eighty they are declared legally dead so that their heirs can inherit.
Q 23Which real country does Gulliver visit at the end of his third voyage?
Japan
Rats: two of them climb the bed curtains, and Gulliver kills one with his sword and wounds the other as it flees.
Q 14What is the name of the giant farmer's daughter who becomes Gulliver's nurse and companion?
Glumdalclitch
Glumdalclitch, whose name means 'little nurse', is nine years old and, at not above forty feet, little for her age; she goes with Gulliver into the queen's service.
Q 15What does the giant farmer do with Gulliver before selling him?
Exhibits him for money as a curiosity
Exhibits him for money as a curiosity: the farmer shows Gulliver at inns and market towns, ten times a day in the capital, until he is worn almost to a skeleton.
Q 16What carries off Gulliver's travelling box and drops it into the sea, ending his second voyage?
A giant eagle
A giant eagle seizes the travelling box by its ring and, harried by other eagles, drops it into the sea, where the crew of an English ship find Gulliver floating.
Q 17What does Gulliver offer to teach the giant king, who recoils in horror?
The use of guns and cannon
The use of guns and cannon: Gulliver offers the secret of gunpowder as a gift, and the appalled king orders him, as he values his life, never to speak of it again.
Q 18What is Laputa, the first land Gulliver reaches on his third voyage?
A flying island
Laputa is a flying island about four and a half miles across, held aloft by a giant lodestone set in an adamantine base and steered by tilting the magnet.
Q 19Which absurd project is under way at the Grand Academy of Lagado?
Extracting sunbeams from cucumbers
One projector has spent eight years extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, to be sealed in vials and let out to warm the air in raw summers; he begs Gulliver for money.
Q 20The Grand Academy of Lagado satirises which real institution?
The Royal Society
The Royal Society's experimenters become Swift's 'projectors', each certain that success is only a few years off and each begging visitors for money to carry on.
In Japan Gulliver lands at Xamoschi and, posing as a Dutchman, asks the Emperor to excuse him from trampling on the crucifix, as Dutch traders were required to do.
Q 24What are the Houyhnhnms?
Intelligent, civilised horses
Intelligent, civilised horses, the Houyhnhnms are so ruled by reason that their language has no word for lying; they call it 'saying the thing which was not'.
Q 25What are the Yahoos?
Savage, filthy human-like creatures
The Yahoos are savage, filthy human-like creatures kept as beasts by the Houyhnhnms; Swift coined the word, which now means a crude, brutish person.
Q 26Why does Gulliver end up in the land of the Houyhnhnms?
His crew mutinies and maroons him
His crew mutinies and maroons him: the sailors he hired turn out to be buccaneers, lock him in his cabin for weeks and row him ashore on the first land they find.
Q 27What does Gulliver try to do when taken aboard Pedro de Mendez's ship?
Leap overboard
Leap overboard: Gulliver would sooner swim for his life than rejoin mankind, yet Don Pedro answers with patience, offers his own best clothes and coaxes him home to his family.
Q 28How does Gulliver spend his time after returning home from his last voyage?
Talking to the horses in his stables
Talking to the horses in his stables takes up at least four hours of his day, while he finds the very smell of his wife and children unbearable.
Q 29Which two subjects obsess the absent-minded people of Laputa, right down to the shapes of their food?
Mathematics and music
Mathematics and music: Gulliver is served mutton cut into a triangle and ducks trussed up like fiddles, yet a tailor who measures him with a quadrant makes a suit that does not fit.
Q 30Which London publisher first issued Gulliver's Travels in 1726, altering the text without Swift's consent?
Benjamin Motte
Benjamin Motte toned down or cut the sharpest satire, which outraged Swift, and most of his changes were not undone until a Dublin edition of 1735.