Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Ulysses trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Ulysses trivia usually means one thing: James Joyce's 1922 novel about a single Dublin day, 16 June 1904. This quiz walks the route with it, from Buck Mulligan's shaving bowl on the Sandycove tower to Molly Bloom's unpunctuated 'Yes', taking in the mutton kidney, the lemon soap, the gorgonzola sandwich, the mistaken racing tip, the biscuit tin, the brothel written as a play, and the 50-question catechism Joyce liked best. Characters get their own questions too: where Molly was born, where Bloom's father came from, who Mulligan really was, and the Trieste businessman who was one model for Bloom. The second half follows the book out into the world: Sylvia Beach's Paris shop, the 1,000-copy first edition, The Little Review prosecution, Judge Woolsey's 'emetic but not aphrodisiac' ruling, the British ban until 1936, the Joyce Wars over the corrected text, RTÉ's 30-hour radio version, the 1967 film Ireland banned, and the birth of Bloomsday. A short closing set covers the other famous Ulysses names people search for: Tennyson's poem, the ESA-NASA solar probe and President Grant. For the man himself, see our James Joyce quiz. Easy questions suit anyone who has heard of Bloomsday; the expert tier is for people who have actually finished the book. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the novel, its characters and its publication history, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01James Joyce's Ulysses follows three Dubliners over the course of a single day in which year?
1904
That date, 16 June, is now celebrated every year as Bloomsday.
Q 02Ulysses was published in full on 2 February 1922, a date chosen because it was what?
Joyce's 40th birthday
Sylvia Beach received the first three copies from the printer that morning.
Q 03The title Ulysses is the Latinised name of which hero of Homer's Odyssey?
Odysseus
Joyce first met the character in Charles Lamb's children's version and wrote a school essay calling him 'My Favourite Hero'.
Q 04Which character in Ulysses corresponds to Telemachus, the hero's son in Homer?
Stephen Dedalus
He is the protagonist of Joyce's earlier A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Bloom stands in for Odysseus and Molly for Penelope.
Q 05What is Leopold Bloom's job?
Advertising canvasser
He spends part of the day failing to place an ad at the Freeman's Journal.
Q 06Ulysses is divided into how many episodes?
18
They are grouped in three parts of 3, 12 and 3, echoing the Odyssey's division; the Homeric titles do not appear in the text.
Q 07The novel opens on the roof of a Martello tower in which Dublin suburb?
Sandycove
The action ends across the bay on Howth Head; the real tower is now the James Joyce Tower and Museum.
Q 08Ulysses' famous first sentence introduces which character coming from the stairhead with a bowl of lather?
Buck Mulligan
The 'stately, plump' medical student was modelled on a real Dublin friend Joyce later fell out with.
Q 09Buck Mulligan in Ulysses was partly based on which real Dublin figure, with whom Joyce had fallen out?
Oliver St John Gogarty
He was a medical student who had saved men from drowning and paid the tower's rent himself, unlike Mulligan.
Q 10Joyce himself stayed in the Martello tower of the opening episode in September of the novel's year for how long?
Six nights
Gogarty blamed the abrupt departure on a midnight incident with a loaded revolver.
Q 11Stephen's surname in the novel alludes to the mythical craftsman who built what?
The Labyrinth
In the early draft Stephen Hero it was spelled 'Daedalus'; Mulligan mocks it as 'an ancient Greek' name.
Q 12In 'Nestor', headmaster Garrett Deasy asks Stephen to deliver a newspaper letter about which subject?
Foot-and-mouth disease
The same episode gives us Stephen's line that history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake.
Q 13In Ulysses' 'Calypso' episode, what does Leopold Bloom go out to buy for breakfast?
A mutton kidney
Q 21The 'Wandering Rocks' episode consists of how many short vignettes moving through the streets of Dublin?
Nineteen
It opens with Father Conmee heading north and closes with the Lord Lieutenant's cavalcade.
Q 22The 'Cyclops' episode's antisemitic Fenian, 'the Citizen', is thought to satirise a founder of which organisation?
The Gaelic Athletic Association
Michael Cusack is the model; the Citizen hurls a biscuit tin at Bloom's head and misses.
Q 23Which Gerty MacDowell episode on Sandymount Strand triggered the 1920 US obscenity case?
Nausicaa
John S. Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice brought the case; the Post Office burned copies of the book through the 1920s.
He brings Molly her breakfast in bed along with the mail, including a letter from her concert manager Blazes Boylan.
Q 14The Blooms' home, setting of the 'Calypso', 'Ithaca' and 'Penelope' episodes, is at what address?
7 Eccles Street
Bella Cohen's brothel is on Tyrone Street; the Sweny's chemist where Bloom buys soap still stands on Lincoln Place.
Q 15Under what pseudonym does Leopold Bloom collect a love letter from 'Martha Clifford' at the post office?
Henry Flower
He tears up the envelope in an alley and later composes a reply in the Ormond Hotel.
Q 16Bloom buys a bar of what scented soap at Sweny's Pharmacy in the 'Lotus Eaters' episode?
Lemon
Sweny's still sells the soap to Bloomsday pilgrims today.
Q 17Bantam Lyons mistakenly thinks Bloom is tipping him a horse with what name?
Throwaway
The name is what Bloom actually says as he hands over his newspaper, and the outsider goes on to win the Gold Cup.
Q 18Whose funeral does Bloom attend in the 'Hades' episode?
Paddy Dignam's
During the burial he notices a mysterious man in a mackintosh whose identity is never explained.
Q 19In Davy Byrne's pub, Bloom lunches on a glass of burgundy and a sandwich made with which cheese?
Gorgonzola
He had fled the Burton restaurant, revolted by men eating like animals; the pub is a Bloomsday landmark.
Q 20In the National Library, Stephen expounds a biographical theory about which Shakespeare play?
Hamlet
He argues it grew from the posited adultery of Shakespeare's wife; the theory draws on twelve lectures Joyce gave in 1912.
Q 24The 'Oxen of the Sun' episode, set in a maternity hospital, parodies the history of what?
The English language
It moves from Latinate prose and Anglo-Saxon alliteration through Malory, Bunyan, Dickens and others to modern slang, matching nine months of gestation.
Q 25The 'Circe' episode, set in Bella Cohen's brothel in Nighttown, is written in what form?
A play script
Bloom hallucinates being crowned king of 'Bloomusalem' and being turned into a woman by 'Mr Bello'.
Q 26The 'Ithaca' episode, reportedly Joyce's favourite, is a catechism of how many questions and answers?
309
Its mock-scientific narrator makes many errors, most of them apparently deliberate.
Q 27Molly Bloom's closing soliloquy in 'Penelope' runs to how many paragraphs, famously without punctuation?
Eight
She recalls her childhood on the Rock, her lover Boylan and Bloom's proposal, ending on the word 'Yes'.
Q 28Where was Molly Bloom born?
Gibraltar
Born Marion Tweedy, daughter of an Irish major and a Gibraltarian of Spanish descent, she is honoured with a bronze statue in Gibraltar's Alameda Gardens.
Q 29Leopold Bloom's father, Rudolf Virág, emigrated to Dublin from which country?
Hungary
The town of Szombathely, his fictional birthplace, has held Bloomsday celebrations since 1994.
Q 30Bloom's infant son Rudy, whose death haunts him, lived for how long?
11 days
Daughter Milly, born 1889, is working in a photography business in Mullingar on the day of the novel.