1. “Something cold and soft was falling on her. A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air.” Who is in the middle of a snowy wood?

   1. Estella in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations

   2. Hermione in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

   3. Lucy in CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

   4. Françoise in Alex Garland's The Beach

2. What is the correct English translation of the novel Smillas fornemmelse for sne, which begins with a child falling off a snowy rooftop?

   1. Smiling While the Snow Falls

   2. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow

   3. Snow Falling on Cedars

   4. The Wrong Kind of Snow

3. What is the story of Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose?

   1. An comic tale in which an injured goose misses the migration and has to follow behind three months later, getting into all sorts of scrapes

   2. A children’s fairytale where a naughty nephew is turned into a goose by a witch

   3. An evil chef tries to capture the last snow goose for the king’s 50th birthday party

   4. A hunchbacked painter and a young girl become friends thanks to their shared interest in an injured goose

4. How does Kay’s grandmother describe the snow in Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Snow Queen?

   1. As white bees swarming

   2. As dandruff from heaven

   3. As feathers falling from the skies

   4. As a type of precipitation

5. “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their latter end, upon all the living and the dead.” Said who?

   1. John Self in Martin Amis's Money

   2. Neville in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

   3. Gabriel in James Joyce's The Dead

   4. Harvey Metcalfe in Jeffrey Archer's Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less

6. What is “snow crash” in Neal Stephenson’s novel of the same name?

   1. A mind-altering virus

   2. A nasty pile up on the M20

   3. A landing on an ice-locked planet

   4. A computer virus

7. What is the murderer's signature in PJ Tracy’s Snow Blind?

   1. He escapes from his kills on a sleigh pulled by huskies

   2. Dead bodies are discovered hidden inside snowmen

   3. He kills with an icicle

   4. He kills by chasing his victims into snowy wastelands and leaving them to die

8. What is the name of the polar bear which Hal and Roger befriend in Willard Price’s Arctic Adventure?

   1. Posy

   2. Cottontail

   3. Bjorn

   4. Nanook

9. Which novelist is often blamed for our idealisation of a snowy Christmas?

   1. Henry James

   2. William Thackeray

   3. Charles Dickens

   4. Jane Austen

10. Which poet wrote of “the frost and the boughs / Of the pine-trees crusted with snow”, and “the junipers shagged with ice, / The spruces rough in the distant glitter / Of the January sun”?

    1. Wallace Stevens

    2. TS Eliot

    3. Ezra Pound

    4. Ted Hughes

11. Snow White has skin as white as snow, but how is the rest of her described in the fairytale?

    1. Eyes as green as glass, hair as black as cinders

    2. Cheeks red as a rose, eyes blue as the sea

    3. Hair as black as ebony, lips as red as blood

    4. Hair yellow as a buttercup and lips like a rosebud

12. What is the ice-and-snow-locked land of the armoured bears in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights?

    1. Spitsbergen

    2. Svalbard

    3. Stolbovoy

    4. Chamonix

13. Which Nobel Prize winner has written a novel called Snow?

    1. Naguib Mahfouz

    2. Elfriede Jelinek

    3. Doris Lessing

    4. Orhan Pamuk

14. Who wrote the poem In the Bleak Midwinter, later set to music as a famous hymn, in which “snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow”?

    1. John Milton

    2. Christina Rossetti

    3. Emily Dickinson

    4. Pam Ayres

Solutions

1:C, 2:B, 3:D, 4:A, 5:C, 6:A, 7:B, 8:D, 9:C, 10:A, 11:C, 12:B, 13:D, 14:B

Scores

1. 6 and above.

   Knee deep and hopelessly stuck

2. 10 and above.

   A bit of ice down the neck, but your snow shoes are working

3. 14 and above.

   Slaloming effortlessly down a fast black run