The name Roland, references to his horn, general medieval setting and the title childe (a medieval term not for a child but for an untested knight) suggest that the protagonist is the paladin of The Song of Roland, an 11th-century anonymous french poem. However, The Song of Roland does not feature a tower or a solitary quest by Roland, and is not clearly related to the Browning poem. There does appear to be a connection to an old Scottish ballad and fairy tale called "Childe Roland and Burd Ellen". The connection is indirect: Browning acknowledged that the last line (which is also the title) of the poem was inspired by a line in Shakespeare's King Lear. That line, part of a nonsense stanza recited by Edgar, is thought to have been a reference to the ballad.
The American author Stephen King (born 1947) used the poem as the inspiration for his Dark Tower series of novels.