Colin Robert Chase

Colin Robert Chase (February 5, 1935 – October 13, 1984) was an American academic. An associate professor of English at the University of Toronto, he was known for his contributions to the studies of Old English and Anglo-Latin literature. His best-known work, ''The Dating of Beowulf'', challenged the accepted orthodoxy of the dating of the Anglo-Saxon poem ''Beowulf'', which had settled on a date in the latter half of the eighth century, and left behind what was described in ''A Beowulf Handbook'' as "a cautious and necessary incertitude".

Born in Denver, Chase was one of three sons of a newspaper executive and a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Mary Coyle Chase. Chase's two brothers became actors; he considered such a career, but ultimately studied English literature, classics, and philosophy. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University, Masters of Arts from Saint Louis and Johns Hopkins Universities, and PhD from the University of Toronto in 1971, the same year the university named him an assistant professor.

In addition to ''The Dating of Beowulf'', Chase penned ''Two Alcuin Letter-Books''—a scholarly collection of 24 letters by the eighth-century scholar Alcuin. He also wrote some eight articles and chapters, contributed to the ''Dictionary of the Middle Ages'', and for nearly a decade wrote the ''Beowulf'' section of "This Year's Work in Old English Studies" for the ''Old English Newsletter''. Chase died of cancer in 1984, shortly before his anticipated promotion to full professor.

Early life and education

Colin Robert Chase was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1935. His father, Robert Lamont Chase, was a newspaper executive, and his mother, Mary Coyle Chase, a playwright who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1945. Colin Chase had two brothers, Michael Lamont Chase and Barry Jerome "Jerry" Chase. All three pursued an interest in acting. Michael Chase attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology School of Drama, and was a member of the cast of the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia. Jerry Chase acted in plays and movies, including one of his mother's plays when 14 years old, and wrote the play ''Cinderella Wore Combat Boots''. Colin Chase, meanwhile, nearly pursued an acting career, and would later perform in campus stage productions.

Chase grew up in Denver, where he attended Teller Elementary School. The success of his mother's play ''Harvey'' led to some bullying in fourth grade, leading his mother to write a guest column about it in the ''Dunkirk Evening Observer''. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University in 1956, and studied classics and philosophy for five years at a Jesuit seminary. In 1962 he received a Master of Arts from Saint Louis University, and in 1964 he received a second from Johns Hopkins University; he matriculated at the University of Toronto the same year, became a part-time instructor there in 1967, and completed his PhD in 1971. His dissertation was entitled ''Panel Structure in Old English Poetry''.

Career

Chase became an assistant professor at the University of Toronto in 1971, the same year he completed his PhD Four years later he was promoted to associate professor. At the university he taught a wide variety of classes and had many doctoral students. He was a faculty member of St. Michael's College and the Centre for Medieval Studies; from 1977 until 1984, he chaired the centre's Medieval Latin Committee.

Much of Chase's work was on Old English and Anglo-Latin literature, and he focused his research on the pre-conquest literature of England. He was particularly known for his 1981 edited collection ''The Dating of Beowulf'', and from 1976 served as the chief reviewer of the ''Beowulf'' section of "The Year's Work in Old English Studies" in the ''Old English Newsletter''. Chase's other major publication was a 1975 scholarly edition of ''Two Alcuin Letter-Books'', which collected 24 letters written by the eighth-century scholar Alcuin. Collected for Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, two centuries after Alcuin's death, the letters were preserved in a manuscript from the Cotton collection at the British Library, and many were apparently intended as didactic messages rather than personal correspondence; others were "model letters" including 'thank you' notes and 'get well' cards, likely to help students learn how to compose letters in Latin. Chase also wrote eight articles, and contributed to three videos made by the Toronto Media Centre, most popularly ''The Sutton Hoo ship-burial'', about the Anglo-Saxon ship-burial unearthed at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. He additionally served as an administrative committee member at the early stages of the project to revise Jack Ogilvy's ''Books Known to the English'' and create a reference work mapping the sources that influenced the literary culture of Anglo-Saxon England.

''The Dating of Beowulf'' was credited with challenging the accepted orthodoxy over the date that the epic poem was created. The Old English poem, surviving on a single manuscript from the turn of the millennium, attracted considerable interest after its first modern publication in 1815, and spawned what was termed in ''A Beowulf Handbook'' as a "bewildering debate about perhaps the most vexing problems in ''Beowulf'' scholarship: when was the poem composed, where, by whom, for whom?" Chase's introduction, "Opinions on the Date of Beowulf, 1815–1980"—which one reviewer termed "an essay commendable both for its balance and its economy"—traced a century and a half of academic discourse over the first of these questions, which, having stared with a first tentative date of the poem of shortly after the fourth century, had by 1980 consistently settled on a date in the latter half of the eighth century. Each chapter used a different approach, such as historical, metrical, stylistic, and codicological, to try to date the poem. Chase's own attempt at dating looked at the poem's balanced attitude towards heroic culture, reflecting both appreciation and admonition, to suggest that "''Beowulf'' was written at a time when heroic culture could be treated fully and positively but without romanticizing, by an author neither afraid nor infatuated." Given the paucity of material with which to trace the evolution of historical perspectives, Chase turned to the better-known lives of the saints from the time period. Seeing early lives which appeared "to avoid and even suppress significant exploitation" of heroic culture and values, and later lives which moved "towards a celebration of heroic values in a way that has been fully integrated with Anglo-Saxon culture", Chase suggested that "''Beowulf'' is likely to have been written neither early, in the eighth century, nor late, in the tenth, but in the rapidly changing and chaotic ninth". Other chapters, meanwhile, by scholars such as Peter Clemoes and Kevin Kiernan, suggested a date for the poem as early as the eighth century, and as late as the eleventh. In the book's wake came what was described in ''A Beowulf Handbook'' as "a cautious and necessary incertitude". An anonymous reviewer of the book termed it "one of the most important inconclusions in the study of Old English", and declared that "henceforth every discussion of the poem and its period will begin with reference to this volume."

Chase died in 1984, while his promotion to full professor was underway. At the time he was working on a study of the lives of the saints, and had started a new series of editions of the lives of the pre-conquest saints. The scholar Paul E. Szarmach wrote that Chase "taught us much by his scholarship and by his personal example, and we are in great measure diminished". The Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, matched by the Ontario Student Opportunity Trust Fund, awards the Colin Chase Memorial Bursary each year in Chase's memory. The scholarship goes to "a graduate student in the Centre for Medieval Studies, on the basis of academic excellence and financial need".

Personal life

Chase had a wife, Joyce (), and five children: Deirdre, Robert, Tim, Mary, and Patrick. He was a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, and participated in its training program. He died of cancer in 1984. His wife died in 2003, also of cancer.

Publications

Books

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Chapters

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Articles

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Reviews

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Other

This Year's Work in Old English Studies
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Dictionary of the Middle Ages
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References

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Chase, Colin Robert
American academics of English literature
University of Toronto faculty
Harvard University alumni
Johns Hopkins University alumni
University of Toronto alumni
1935 births
1984 deaths
People from Denver
Anglo-Saxon studies scholars
Saint Louis University alumni