<<Can anyone help my ignorance by telling me who was the Childe Harold of the poem "Childe Harold to the dark tower came"? I am also just about to go to a performance of Harold in Italy by Berlioz and assume that this is the same person. I would just very much like to know who he was. Anybody know?>> Hello Audrey, you're conflating two different poems, Robert Browning's 'Childe Roland to the dark tower came' (published in 1855) and Byron's 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' (1812-1818). The Childe Harold of Byron's poem wasn't an historical person, except in so far as he is generally thought to have been partly based on Byron himself; the poem describes a journey through Mediterranean regions and was written shortly after Byron himself had undertaken such a journey, and in the fourth canto Byron drops Childe Harold and speaks in the first person, giving his own thoughts (and its original title was even Childe Biroun), but Byron himself denied this, and anyway it was more a satirical commentary on contemporary life than autobiographical travel writing. I don't think the name Childe Harold is even historical - as far as I am aware Byron invented it. It was intended to be an Anglo-Saxon one - Byron was writing at the time when historical Romanticism was the fashion (Scott was writing about Saxons and Normans in Ivanhoe, etc), 'child' being a (now obsolete) Anglo-Saxon word meaning something like 'young aristocrat'. I'm afraid I know nothing of Berlioz's work. Browning's Childe Roland wasn't an historical person either - the poem's title comes from a line of a nonsense song spoken by the character Edgar in Shakespeare's King Lear (though Shakespeare is supposed to have taken the name from an old Scottish ballad and fairy tale called 'Childe Roland and Burd Ellen'). Matt Tompkins