Walter Scott Trivia
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48 free Walter Scott trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Sir Walter Scott trivia quiz covers the life and work of the Edinburgh lawyer who invented the modern historical novel and, for a century, was the most-read novelist in Europe. It begins with the man: the childhood polio that left him lame, his one meeting with Robert Burns, the ballad-collecting raids that produced Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, his French-born wife, his beloved dogs and the Borders mansion he built and nearly lost. From there it moves through the poems (The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake) and the Waverley novels: Waverley, Guy Mannering, Rob Roy, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, Ivanhoe, Kenilworth and the rest, published anonymously as by 'the Author of Waverley'. There are questions on the rediscovery of the Honours of Scotland, the tartan pageant he staged for George IV in 1822, the 1826 crash that left him £130,000 in debt, the operas his books inspired, and the monuments, stations and banknotes that carry his name today. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's articles on Scott, his individual works and his monuments, and each explanation adds one further fact. Ideal for book clubs, Scottish literature students and anyone who has climbed the Scott Monument's 287 steps.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which name did Scott apparently invent for a Saxon in Ivanhoe?
Cedric
Cedric apparently began as Scott's slip for Cerdic, an early king of Wessex, given to the hero's father; Frances Hodgson Burnett later passed the name on to her Little Lord Fauntleroy.
Q 02Which childhood illness in 1773 left Scott with a lifelong limp?
Polio
The illness was polio, which struck in infancy; he was sent to recover on his grandparents' Borders farm, where his aunt's old songs and his grandmother's tales of feuds and raids gave him his lifelong subject.
Q 03Which Scottish poet did the 15-year-old Scott meet, just once, at an Edinburgh literary salon?
Robert Burns
Robert Burns was moved to tears by a print and asked who wrote the lines beneath it; only young Scott knew, and Burns rewarded him with a look and a word that he remembered with pleasure all his life.
Q 04What was Scott's profession alongside writing?
Lawyer
Scott was a lawyer, called to the bar as an advocate in 1792; his later posts as Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire and Clerk of Session paid a steady salary without court pleading, which left him time to write.
Q 05Scott's wife Charlotte Charpentier was born in which country?
France
Charlotte Charpentier, who anglicised her name to Carpenter, was born in France; Scott met her on a trip to Cumberland in 1797, proposed after three weeks and married her in Carlisle that Christmas Eve.
Q 06Scott's two-volume 1802 collection of traditional ballads was titled what?
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border sold out its first edition in six months; Scott gathered the ballads on 'raids' into the Border hills but mended and merged the texts, a liberty editors have criticised since.
Q 07Scott's first publication, in 1796, was a pair of ballads translated from which language?
German
German: Scott studied the language to read its new poets and dramatists, and his 1796 debut, The Chase, and William and Helen, rendered two supernatural ballads by Gottfried August Bürger.
Q 08Scott's first long narrative poem, published in 1805, was called what?
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) took its irregular four-beat metre from Coleridge's then-unpublished Christabel, which Scott had heard recited, and it made his name as a poet.
Q 09Scott's 1808 poem Marmion builds to which battle?
Flodden
Flodden, the 1513 defeat where James IV fell, ends Marmion; Scott's publisher agreed 1,000 guineas for the poem a year before it was finished.
Q 10Scott's 1813 poem Rokeby is set in northern England just after which Civil War battle?
Marston Moor
Marston Moor, the Parliamentarian victory of 1644, sets the plot moving; the poem is named after Rokeby Park, home of Scott's friend John Morritt, whose Velázquez nude is known as the Rokeby Venus.
Q 11On which body of water does Ellen Douglas row out to rescue the lost huntsman in The Lady of the Lake?
Loch Katrine
Ellen Douglas rows her skiff from Ellen's Isle on Loch Katrine, in the Trossachs, to the stranger James Fitz-James, who proves to be the king himself.
Q 12Which poet's 1812 bestseller ended Scott's reign as Britain's most popular poet?
Lord Byron
Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812) made Byron the sensation of the day; Scott, sensing he had been outshone in verse, turned increasingly to prose fiction.
Q 13What was Scott's first novel, published anonymously in 1814?
Waverley
Waverley came out anonymously in July 1814; by Scott's own account he had abandoned the manuscript years before and found it again in a drawer while hunting for fishing tackle.
Q 21Which proverbial line comes from Scott's 1808 poem Marmion?
Oh, what a tangled web we weave
'Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive' comes from the poem's last canto; the couplet is quoted so widely that it is often credited to Shakespeare by mistake.
Q 22Ivanhoe broke with Scott's earlier novels by being set where and when?
12th-century England
Ivanhoe is set in 12th-century England, in 1194; its opening has a jester point out that swine and ox keep their Saxon names in the field but turn into Norman pork and beef on the lord's table.
Q 23Who is the Norman king that Wilfred of Ivanhoe supports, to his Saxon father's fury?
Q 14Which historical event forms the backdrop of Scott's first novel?
The Jacobite rising of 1745
The Jacobite rising of 1745 is the backdrop: the subtitle, ''Tis Sixty Years Since', counts the years between the rebellion and Scott's own day, and the hero is an English officer who goes over to Charles Edward Stuart.
Q 15The word freelance is traced to Ivanhoe, where the Free Lances were what?
Mercenary soldiers
Mercenary soldiers: in Ivanhoe their captain says he offered the king 'the service of my Free Lances', men who fought for whoever paid, and the term later spread to anyone working without a fixed employer.
Q 16Which folk hero appears in Ivanhoe as Locksley?
Robin Hood
Robin Hood leads the outlaws who help storm the castle in Ivanhoe; an old manuscript had named Locksley as his birthplace, and after Scott many retellings call the outlaw Robin of Locksley.
Q 17Which Scott novel is set in 1715 and narrated by Frank Osbaldistone?
Rob Roy
Rob Roy gives the novel its title but not its hero: the narrator, Frank Osbaldistone, is an English merchant's son who chases stolen papers into the Highlands, where the outlaw keeps crossing his path.
Q 18The Heart of Mid-Lothian takes its title from which building?
The Old Tolbooth prison
The Old Tolbooth prison in Edinburgh was nicknamed the Heart of Midlothian; the novel opens with the 1736 Porteous Riots there and follows Jeanie Deans's walk to London to save her sister.
Q 19In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Jeanie Deans's sister has been condemned for what?
Murdering her newborn baby
Effie Deans is condemned for murdering her newborn baby under a statute that presumed guilt from a concealed pregnancy; Scott based Jeanie on Helen Walker, whose story reached him in an anonymous letter.
Q 20Which Scott novel became Donizetti's most famous tragic opera in 1835?
The Bride of Lammermoor
The Bride of Lammermoor became Lucia di Lammermoor; Scott took the plot from a family tale of 1669, in which Janet Dalrymple, forced to give up her lover, is said to have wounded her bridegroom on their wedding night.
Richard the Lionheart
Richard the Lionheart is the king Wilfred followed on crusade; his Saxon father disinherits him for that loyalty and for loving the Lady Rowena, a ward he meant for a Saxon prince.
Q 24In Ivanhoe, Isaac of York equips the disguised hero for a tournament held where?
Ashby-de-la-Zouch
Ashby-de-la-Zouch hosts the tournament where the 'Disinherited Knight' triumphs in armour lent by Isaac of York; made to unmask to receive his prize, he is revealed as Ivanhoe and found to be badly wounded.
Q 25Which Templar knight is the villain who pursues Rebecca in Ivanhoe?
Brian de Bois-Guilbert
Brian de Bois-Guilbert carries Rebecca off to Templestowe, then must fight as the Templars' champion at her trial; he falls dead in the saddle, untouched by his opponent's lance, a victim of his own warring passions.
Q 26Kenilworth (1821) builds up to a lavish reception of Elizabeth I by which nobleman?
The Earl of Leicester
The Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, did entertain the queen at Kenilworth in 1575; Scott ties the revels to the death of his hidden wife Amy Robsart, who had in fact died fifteen years earlier, in 1560.
Q 27Which monarch's 1822 visit to Scotland did Scott stage-manage as a tartan pageant?
George IV
George IV landed at Leith in August 1822, the first reigning monarch to visit Scotland in nearly two centuries; Scott had three weeks to stage the welcome and put the king himself into tartan, once a banned Highland dress.
Q 28What happened to Scott's baronetcy after his elder son's death in 1847?
It became extinct
It became extinct: Scott's elder son, the second baronet, died in 1847 leaving no heir to the title, and Abbotsford passed to the novelist's grandchildren.
Q 29What was the muddy nickname of the farm Scott bought in 1811 and renamed Abbotsford?
Clarty Hole
Clarty Hole, 'clarty' being Scots for dirty or muddy, was the local nickname of Cartley Hole farm; Scott bought it in 1811, when the lease on his previous home ran out, and gave it the grander name Abbotsford.
Q 30On which river does Abbotsford stand?
The Tweed
The Tweed flows past Abbotsford near Melrose; Scott began with a riverside farm of about a hundred acres and kept buying out his neighbours until the estate was many times that size.