Celtic & Arthurian Legend Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which queen, the wife of King Arthur, carried on a long love affair with the foremost knight of the Round Table, a betrayal that, once exposed, split the fellowship and helped bring down the kingdom?

Question 2

Which Gaelic festival, on the first of May, opened the summer half of the year and centred on fire: householders would put out every hearth, then relight it from a communal bonfire, and drive their cattle between two such fires for protection before turning them out to the summer grazing?

Question 3

Which king spent his life in pursuit of a strange beast that no one else could catch, unhorsed the young Arthur early on and broke his first sword, and later killed King Lot of Orkney in battle, setting off a blood feud with Lot's sons?

Question 4

Which four royal siblings of Irish legend were turned into swans by their jealous stepmother and aunt, Aoife, and condemned to spend 900 years on three cold and lonely stretches of water before the spell could break?

Question 5

What is the name for the hostile, monstrous, chaotic people of Irish myth, associated with the sea, blight and the wild, who demanded a crushing tribute from Ireland and were defeated by the gods at the second battle of Mag Tuired?

Question 6

Which Irish god arrived at the royal hall and won admission only by proving he could do every single craft, when it turned out the court already had a specialist in each, earning the epithet 'skilled in all the arts together'?

Question 7

Which queen of Connacht started the great cattle raid of the Ulster Cycle after a pillow-talk boast about her possessions ended in a dead heat with her husband, except that he owned a great bull she could not equal?

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About Celtic & Arthurian Legend

This quiz covers two overlapping bodies of legend. One is the Matter of Britain, the stories of King Arthur, Merlin and the knights of the Round Table, built up over centuries by Welsh storytellers, Geoffrey of Monmouth, the French poet Chretien de Troyes and, finally, Sir Thomas Malory. The other is Celtic mythology proper: the Irish tales of the Tuatha De Danann, the Ulster Cycle of Cu Chulainn and the Fenian Cycle of Fionn mac Cumhaill, and the Welsh tales collected as the Mabinogion. Eighty questions describe a character, a creature, an object, a place, a text or a festival and ask you to name it from four choices, then explain the story and how it has come down to us. Where versions differ, the most familiar is used and the main variants noted; names are given in the spellings an English reader is likeliest to know, with alternatives supplied, and the tone is that of retelling rather than of settling which strand of a much-rewritten legend is 'right'. Arthurian material and Celtic material are kept distinct even where medieval writers blurred them, as when Welsh storytellers pulled Arthur into tales of the old gods.

The first pack is the Arthurian core: Arthur himself, Merlin, Guinevere and Lancelot; Excalibur, the Round Table and the Holy Grail; Camelot and Avalon; Mordred, Morgan le Fay and the Lady of the Lake; Gawain, Galahad and Percival; Tristan and Iseult; Uther Pendragon, the sword in the stone, the Green Knight and the last battle of Camlann.

The second pack widens out on both sides. More of the Round Table, Kay, Bedivere, Bors, Gareth, the Fisher King, the Questing Beast, Elaine of Astolat, and the writers Geoffrey, Malory and Chretien. Then the Irish gods and heroes: the Tuatha De Danann and their enemies the Fomorians, the Dagda, Lugh, the Morrigan, Balor and Nuada; Cu Chulainn and the Cattle Raid of Cooley, Queen Medb, Deirdre and Ferdiad; Fionn, the Fianna, Oisin, and Diarmuid and Grainne; the sea god Manannan, the Land of the Young, the fairy mounds and the Children of Lir.

The third pack is Welsh myth and the wider Celtic world: the Mabinogion and its Four Branches, Rhiannon on her white horse, the giant Bran, the Otherworld of Annwn, the enchantress Ceridwen and the bard Taliesin, and the tale of Culhwch and Olwen. It also covers the four great seasonal festivals, Samhain, Beltane, Imbolc and Lughnasadh, and Halloween's descent from the first of them; the goddess Brigid; the antlered god Cernunnos and the Gundestrup Cauldron; the druids; the ogham alphabet; the passage tomb of Newgrange; and the Salmon of Knowledge. Because a captioned illustration usually gives the answer away, images are used only where a site photo or an ambiguous artefact does not, and everything has been checked against standard reference works.