Date Unknown - Childe Rowland
I have, at long last, obtained this text (kudos to Joe Hughes for finding it and mailing me copies.) I have typed it up as a text file and you can read it as well by following this link.
The story involves four siblings, three boys and a girl. The girl, Burd Ellen, is kidnapped by the King of Fairy after walking widershins around a church to retrieve a lost ball. The eldest brother seeks the advice of Merlin and goes in search of his lost sister. He never returns. The middle brother does the same and also vanishes. Finally the youngest, Childe Rowland, gains permission from his mother to try as well. Merlin tells him that in order to succeed he must do two things, he must cut off the head of every person he meets from the time he enters the land of Fairy until he finds Burd Ellen and he must not eat or drink anything while in the boundaries of the Fairy Kingdom. Childe Rowland ventures forth, meeting a horseherd, cowherd and henwife, asking each for directions and then killing them. He finally arrives at a large hill and the Fairy King's Dark Tower. He gains entry and battles and overcomes the King of Fairy. The terms of his surrender are to release all four children. He does this and everyone lives happily ever after.
An interesting side note: Shakespeare makes reference to this ballad in King Lear, Act III, Scene iv, where Edgar (disguised as the madman Tom O'Bedlam) says "Child Rowland to the Dark Tower came, / His word was still 'Fie, foh, and fum, / I smell the blood of a British man'."
Date Unknown - The Tower
The sixteenth card of the Higher Arcana in any Tarot deck, this card is typically read as meaning a particularly painful, arduous or terrifying experience that ultimately offers freedom from oppression. Several versions of the card show a man and woman falling from the tower.
Circa 1100 A.D. - The Song of Roland
This epic poem (the only remaining complete epic written in French) tells the story of the nephew of Charlemagne and how, while fighting in Spain, he and the entire rear guard of Charlemagne's army were wiped out because Roland's stepfather, Ganelon, was a traitor and sold out his own people to the Saracen so Roland would be killed. Roland himself is partly to blame as well because he failed to blow his horn and call reinforcements. The author of the epic used this story to show the righteous battle between the Christians of the crusades (Roland, his 11 companions {together called "the 12 peers"}, and 20,000 French soldiers) and the "heathens" who destroyed them (presented as Muslims, although the historical culprits were Basques.) Roland's companions in this text are as follows: Oliver, Gerin, Count Gerer, Oton, Berenger, Astor, Anseis, Gerard of Roussillon, Duke Gaifier, Archbishop Turpin of Reims, and Count Gautier. This text is too long for me to make available in electronic format, but you can find it at this web page.
1855 - "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning
By his own admission King has been greatly influenced by the poem. It tells the story of a Roland searching for a "Dark Tower". In his search Roland loses all of his companions (including one named Cuthbert), is forced to cross many types of blasted terrain not unlike a desert or wasteland, and when he finally arrives at the tower he is greeted by the eerie sound of the names of his companions and their deeds being spoken. He sees them standing in a sheet of flame on the hilltops surrounding the tower and blows his horn to signify that he has arrived. If you would like the electronic text file version of this poem follow this link.
Circa 1938 - "The Dark Tower" by C.S. Lewis
Only a fragment of this story still exists today, but what is left of it was published in 1974. There are several gaps in the manuscript and it is entirely possible that Lewis never even finished the story (rather than he did finish it, but the rest was lost.) Due to copyright restrictions I cannot make this text available, but you can purchase it at finer bookstores everywhere.
Here several men discuss the nature of time travel and, since they deem it impossible to physically travel to other times, they invent a chronoscope to look in on other times. This device consists of a telescope like tube which contains some exotic material. When a light is shone through one end and projected out the other onto a screen images of another time appear. They have no control over these images, but they always fall within 10 miles or so of what they call "The Dark Tower", knowingly making the connection to Browning. Through this window to the other world they see the Dark Tower being constructed by a race of people divided into three castes.
There are workers who actually do the manual labor, there are the supervisors of the workers (called "Jerkies") who are un-naturally stiff in their movements, and there is the high lord of the Tower called "the Stingingman". They watch in fascinated horror at the Stingingman who has a scorpion-like stinger protruding from his forehead. People of the working class come before him stripped to the waist and he injects his venom into their spine turning them into one of the "Jerkies".
Soon it becomes apparent that the world they are viewing may not be another time at all, they begin to see familiar faces in the crowd, and the tower seems achingly familiar (it turns out to be almost an exact replica of the tower at the Cambridge library.) One of the familiar faces is that of one of the men gathered to view this other world and they follow this duplicate as he moves from one scene to the next. Eventually this duplicate falls ill and just as they all think he is about to die he grows a stinger in the middle of his forehead. Nothing more is seen of the previous Stingingman, but the duplicate of the confused Englishman is raised to the exalted status of Lord of the Dark Tower. Just as the men are about to witness the stinging of his first victim the man who has been duplicated loses all sense of sanity and lunges for the screen (the girl who was to be stung was the duplicate of his own fiancee.) Somehow a transference takes place and his mind becomes trapped in the body of the Stingingman and vice versa.
Lewis never completed the story beyond this point. The man from England is trying to keep himself and the woman he thought was his fiancee alive in the world of the Dark Tower while the Stingingman evades capture in the streets of England. It is clear in this story that Lewis meant to make a point about alternate realities, but he was either un-aware of the term or deliberately chose not to use it. King's use of the doorways in book 2 is extremely similar to Lewis' description of the chronoscope.
1946 - "The Dark Tower", BBC Radio Play written by Louis Macneice.
I have no further information on this work and would be most interested in a tape or transcript if anyone knows where it can be obtained please let me know!