Maiden Voyage Trivia Quiz

Answer: Vasa

Though the tragedy of HMS Titanic is probably the best-known instance of a maiden voyage going seriously wrong, it is far from being the only one. The sinking of the Swedish warship "Vasa" on 10 August 1628 was one of the earliest recorded cases of a ship being lost on its very first journey. Built in 1626-1627 by order of Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, the ship was named after the Swedish royal house, symbolizing the primary role the Scandinavian kingdom would play on the European stage for almost 100 years. The magnificent vessel (whose 1:10 scale model can be seen in the photo) was decorated with brightly-painted wooden sculptures, and equipped with an impressive array of bronze cannons. Most of that weight was concentrated in the upper structure of the hull, which very likely contributed to the sinking of the ship on its maiden voyage. When sudden gusts of wind pushed it on its port side, the "Vasa" was unable to right itself, and sank about 1,300 m (1,400 yd) from Stockholm harbour; 30 members of the crew perished in the disaster.

Over 300 years later, the wreck of the "Vasa" was located again, and salvaged in 1961; its largely intact hull can be viewed at the popular Vasa Museum, located in Stockholm's Royal National City Park. All the ships listed as wrong answers also sank on their maiden voyage: the Dutch cargo ship "Batavia" in 1629, the Confederate steamer "Georgiana" in 1863, and the Swedish passenger ferry "Zenobia" in 1980.

Answer: Nuremberg

Often referenced in literature and film, the grisly device known as the Iron Maiden is very likely a 19th-century creation rather than a real instrument of torture used in the Middle Ages. The Iron Maiden in the photo, probably the most famous exhibit in the Crime Museum of the Bavarian town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, is a 19th-century copy of the original Iron Maiden of Nuremberg, which was destroyed during WWII. The original device, however, was nowhere as gruesome, being basically a barrel-like wooden coat ("Schandmantel", or "coat of shame") used to humiliate drunkards, poachers and prostitutes. The nails or spikes so popular in horror tales were probably made from French bayonets, and added in the early 19th century to horrify and intrigue the paying visitors of a Nuremberg cabinet of horrors. Though torture museums all over Europe display spiked Iron Maidens, all of them are fanciful creations that may have been inspired by tales dating from much earlier times, such as the Iron Apega, a mechanical statue of the wife of a Spartan tyrant, whose arms and breasts were covered in iron nails.

Rothenburg ob der Tauber lies about 80 km west of Nuremberg, in the Franconia region of the German federal state of Bavaria. Nuremberg, Bavaria's second-largest city, was the site of the famous trials that followed the end of WWII.

Answer: Persephone

The daughter of Zeus and his sister Demeter, Persephone was abducted by Hades, the king of the Underworld, with Zeus' permission. The tale of her abduction is told in detail in the "Homeric Hymn to Demeter", and depicted in many works of art. This deity has an interesting dual role: as goddess of spring and vegetation, she is known as Kore, while the name Persephone (or Persephassa) is associated with her role as queen of the Underworld. In this latter role, she was conflated with an ancient chthonic deity, named Despoina ("The Mistress"); in literary sources her name is often accompanied by the epithet "dread", as in the episode of "The Odyssey" when Odysseus visits the Underworld (Book 11). Together with her mother Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, Persephone was the focus of the Eleusynian mysteries, secret initiation rites that reenacted the myth of the goddess' abduction and return to her mother.

The painting in the photo, by Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, bears the goddess' Latin name of "Proserpine"(1874). The pomegranate held in the goddess's hand refers to the trick employed by Hades to keep Persephone in the Underworld for part of the year. Before she returned to the surface, he fed her some pomegranate seeds: having tasted "the food of the dead" would keep Persephone connected to Hades' realm at least during the winter months.

Answer: J.M.W. Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on 23 April 1775 to a family of modest condition; his father, originally from Devon, worked as a barber and wig maker, while his mother came from a family of butchers. The house where he was born, and where his father had his barber shop, was located at 21 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden; though it no longer exists, a plaque marks the spot where it used to stand. Named after a statue of the Virgin Mary that once stood there, Maiden Lane runs from Bedford Street to Southampton Street. One of London's oldest restaurants, Rules, founded in 1798, is located at No. 34: it appeared in several episodes of the successful TV series "Downton Abbey".

The painting in the photo is one of Turner's undisputed masterpieces, "The Fighting Temeraire" (1838), displayed at the National Gallery of Art in London. While Blake and Constable are also considered Romantic painters, George Stubbs was mostly active in the 18th century.

Answer: Berkshire

Home to about 70,000 people, the market town of Maidenhead lies on the southwestern bank of the Thames, 11 km (7 mi) northwest of Windsor, in the south-eastern English county of Berkshire. The town's name comes from "Maiden Hythe" ("new wharf") - a reference to the wharf built on the riverside in the 13th century to replace the old Saxon one. By the 18th century, Maidenhead had become a busy coaching town because of its favourable location on the road connecting London with Bath. The stately Maidenhead Bridge, shown in the photo, was built between 1772 and 1777 to replace the old wooden bridge on the Thames. The town further expanded in the 19th century with the arrival of the Great Western Railway: the Maidenhead Railway Bridge, carrying the Great Western main line over the Thames, was designed by famed civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and inaugurated in 1839. The bridge appears in J.M.W. Turner's famous painting "Rail, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway" (1844).

Maidenhead is the birthplace of Hugo Lofting (1886-1947), author of the popular "Doctor Dolittle" series of children's books. The town has been the constituency of former UK PM Theresa May since 1997. Of the three counties listed as wrong answers, only Kent is also part of South-East England.

Answer: Sigourney Weaver

Released in 1994, Roman Polanski's "Death and the Maiden" was based on the play of the same name by Argentine-Chilean-American author and activist Ariel Dorfman (1990). Like the play, the movie is set in an unnamed Latin American country (very likely to be Chile, which Dorfman was forced to leave after the notorious 1973 military coup) that has recently transitioned to democracy after a long period of dictatorship. Sigourney Weaver plays the role of Paulina, a former political prisoner who meets by chance a man she suspects of having raped and tortured her years before (played by Ben Kingsley). The title comes from Franz Schubert's String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, known as "Death and the Maiden", which Paulina's captor played during the rape.

The motif of "Death and the Maiden", derived from the medieval concept of the Danse Macabre (Dance of Death), was especially popular during the German Renaissance. The sculpture in the photo, however, was produced in 1905 by Danish sculptor Elna Borch, and can be viewed at Copenhagen's Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek.

Sigourney Weaver's breakthrough was the role of Ripley in Ridley Scott's 1979 film "Alien"; she also starred in the movie's three sequels.

Answer: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera "The Snow Maiden", composed in 1880-1881, was based on the play of the same title by Alexander Ostrovsky (1873). The play was in turn based on Snegurochka, a character that appears in Russian folktales. The opera deals with the interaction between real people and mythological and semi-mythical characters representing the forces of nature - such as the Snow Maiden herself and her parents, Spring Beauty and Grandfather Frost. "The Snow Maiden", which was the composer's favourite work. was premiered on 29 January 1882 in Saint Petersburg. Rimsky-Korsakov's works were often inspired by Russian folklore, and "The Snow Maiden" contains a number of traditional folk songs and dances. "Flight of the Bumblebee" is an orchestral interlude that appears in the opera "The Tale of Tsar Saltan" (1900), based on a fairy-tale poem by Alexander Pushkin.

"The Snow Maiden" is classified as type 703 in the classification of folktales known as the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index. The photo shows the cover of a 1916 book of the tale of Snegurochka.

Answer: Zoroastrianism

Located in Baku's historic Old City, the Maiden Tower ("Qiz qalası" in Azerbaijani) is one of Azerbaijan's national emblems, also depicted on the country's currency and official stationery. Though its present form dates from the 12th century, the tower's foundations may be over 2,000 years old. With its distinctive, tapering cylindrical shape, the eight-story tower is 29.5 m (97 ft) tall; it was built on solid rock, on a strip of land close to the Caspian Sea shoreline. Though its original purpose is still shrouded in mystery, the tower is believed by some experts to have been a Zoroastrian fire-temple, with seven fire-exits on the top floor (seven being a sacred number in the Zoroastrian religion). A museum dedicated to the history of Baku is located inside the tower. Baku's Old City ("Icherisheher") was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000.

There are many legends attached to this structure: one of them, about a maiden forced by her father to marry a man she does not love, and committing suicide by jumping from the top of the tower, inspired a ballet composed by Afrasiyyab Badalbayli in 1940. Another explanation for the tower's name is that it was never taken by force by any enemy.

Zoroastrianism, based on the teaching of Iranian prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra), is a dualistic religion that originated in ancient Persia, probably around the 2nd millennium BC, and is still practiced today.

Answer: ginkgo

Ginkgo biloba (occasionally also spelled as gingko) is the only extant species in the gymnosperm order Ginkgoales, which first appeared on Earth over 290 million years ago. Widely cultivated for ornamental purposes, this beautiful tree is a native of China; its name is believed to be a misspelling of the Japanese "gin kyo", meaning "silver apricot". The common name "maidenhair tree" comes from the similarity of ginkgo leaves with the pinnae (single leaflets) of the maidenhair fern (Adiantus capillus-veneris). Ginkgo trees can grow to over 35 m (115 ft) tall; they are prized for their unique, fan-shaped leaves, and the magnificent saffron yellow colour of their autumn foliage. They are also very hardy and long-lived: a huge ginkgo tree in Kamakura (Japan), uprooted by a storm in 2010, was believed to be over 1,000 years old, and six trees in Hiroshima survived the 1945 atom bomb explosion.

Ginkgo leaves are rich in phytochemicals, though the efficacy of leaf extracts in the treatment of various conditions has not been scientifically proven. The fruit-like structures that can be seen in the photo, called sarcotesta, cover the tree's nut-like seeds, which are traditionally eaten in China and Japan. The ginkgo is the official tree of Tokyo, the capital of Japan, and a stylized, bright green ginkgo leaf is the symbol of the Tokyo Metropolis.

Answer: Finland

As in the well-known cases of Mother Russia and France's Marianne, many country personifications are female. Finland's symbol of national identity is a bare-footed, blonde girl wearing the country's colours of white and blue. The Finnish Maiden ("Suomi-neito" in Finnish, "Finlands mö" in Swedish) was born as a symbol of Finland's yearning for independence in the 19th century. Her most famous depiction is in Edvard Isto's 1899 allegorical painting "Hyökkäys" ("The Attack"), in which the Maiden tries to defend the book of Finnish laws from the attack of a two-headed eagle representing the Russian Empire. The painting, a reaction to the Russification of Finland of 1899-1905, is on display at Helsinki's National Museum.

Finland's shape on a map has also been likened to a woman's, with a head, a skirt and one arm raised: before the Moscow Armistice of 1944, there was another arm on the northeastern side, the Petsamo province, which was ceded to the Soviet Union. Even to this day, the northwestern area bordering Sweden and Norway, around the municipality of Enontekiö in Lapland, is commonly known as "Käsivarsi" ("The Arm").

In the past, Belgium and Germany have both been represented as women, while Denmark's national personification is the hero Holger Danske (Ogier the Dane).