Cultural Literacy Quiz 02: How Culturally Literate Are You?
The Second Installment in an Ongoing Series
[If you missed the first quiz, take it here].
01. An ancient Irish myth relates how this woman was transformed into a swan, and how Aengus could only marry her after he had identified her from among 150 other swans.
02. Prior to becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 1333, this man, then Bishop of Winchester, intervened on behalf of Christina Carpenter, who faced excommunication for having second thoughts about becoming an anchorite.
03. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death; and Hell followed with him,” said this country singer, in a song recorded shortly before his death, drawing imagery from the Book of Revelation.
04. In this 1897 William Butler Yeats poem, an old man (possibly an aged Irish god) vows to “pluck till time and tides are done / The silver apples of the moon / The golden apples of the sun.”
05. The dragon Ladon guarded these fruits, which Heracles acquired in his eleventh labor after narrowly avoiding being tricked by Atlas into upholding the world for eternity.
06. In Welsh mythology, Math, King of Gwynedd, was obliged to keep his feet in the lap of a virgin; when this woman attempted to be his foot-holder, she instantly gave birth to two sons.
07. Little known in America, this English rock band sold more than 50 million records, and in 1973 released “Merry Xmas Everybody,” now a perennial U. K. Christmas anthem.
08. Betraying her own father, she assisted Theseus during his voyage to the Isle of Crete to defeat the Minotaur; later, some say, she married Dionysus and was placed among the stars.
09. Running for over thirty years on the BBC, this children’s programme featured classic stories read by the likes of Jon Pertwee, Alan Rickman, Paul McGann, Ian McKellen, and Prince Charles, reading from his own book.
10. Among the films that kicked off the British folk-horror craze in the late 1960s & early 1970s were Blood on Satan’s Claws, The Wicker Man and this film, also starring Christopher Lee as a scholarly duke battling Satan on Salisbury Plain.
11. They sang about hobbits, Gollum and Mordor in songs such as “Battle of Evermore,” “Over the Hills and Far Away” and “Misty Mountain Hop.”
12. “Childe Roland to the dark tower came / His word was still ‘fi, fo and fum / I smell the blood of a British man,’” says a man feigning insanity in this Shakespeare tragedy.
13. In 1869, this French monarch offered a cash prize for the invention of an inexpensive butter substitute; thus margarine was born.
14. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were shown with this object in an 1843 engraving for the Illustrated London News—inadvertently inaugurating a deathless Yule tradition.
15. At the age of sixteen, according to biographer Andrew Roberts, he told a friend that he would one day save Britain from foreign invasion.
16. “There is nothing I yearn for more intensely ... than to be taken for a better sort of Tchaikovsky,” wrote this pioneer of atonal music. “... Or, if anything more, then that people should know my tunes and whistle them.”
17. On Wednesday, January 4, 1660, he recorded in his diary, “I went down into the Hall and to Will’s, where Hawly brought a piece of his Cheshire cheese, and we were merry with it.”
18. Smoking in bed, he set fire to Orson Welles’ home in Spain, in the process destroying the only surviving recording of a stage production of Moby-Dick featuring Welles, Christopher Lee and Patrick McGoohan.
19. In his youth this publisher of the New York Herald was known for his drunken antics, including shooting up his own chandelier, careening naked through Central Park, and overturning a carriage containing the future mother of Winston Churchill.
20. More recently the inspiration for a song by the Lumineers, Shakespeare has her say, “Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have immortal longings in me” shortly before her death by asp.
21. He began an October 1945 essay with the words, “Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected.”
22. According to a medieval bestiary, this beast is “a stubborn, lascivious animal, always eager to mate, whose eyes are so full of lust that they look sideways.”
23. Swedish Christmas festivities feature an appearance from this eyeless saint, portrayed by a young girl wearing a whortleberry leaf crown, a white gown and crimson stockings.
24. This author, wrote C. S. Lewis in a 1937 review, “has the air of inventing nothing. He has studied trolls and dragons at first hand and describes them with that fidelity which is worth oceans of glib ‘originality.’”
25. This beloved British actor appeared only once as the Doctor, in a poorly rated TV movie; however, his version of the character found a second life on audio, appearing most notably in the Christmas-themed “The Chimes of Midnight.”
26. He was, Homer tells us, the son of Hector & Andromache; Odysseus, fearing reprisals if he should live to manhood, had him flung from the walls of Troy to his death.
27. This Texan singer and songwriter, despairing over his lack of success, once attempted to kill himself by lying on Broadway, the main thoroughfare in Nashville; a few years later, his “Crazy” was a hit for Patsy Cline.
28. “Legerdemain” and “flim-flammery” are favorite insults deployed by Reginald Bright, the cantankerous chief superintendent played by Anton Lesser in this ITV mystery series.
29. “Oh, the Slitheree-Dee has crawled out of the sea / He may catch all the others, but he won’t catch me,” says the ill-fated narrator of a poem by this beloved children’s author who also wrote “A Boy Named Sue.”
30. At the Last Supper, Jesus says to Judas, “I know where you are from—the realm of Barbelo!” in this apocryphal gospel.
Answers below the jump:
