Wikipedia:Today's featured article/February 5, 2023

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 father was a newspaper executive and his mother, Mary Chase, was a playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His best-known work, The Dating of Beowulf, challenged the accepted consensus as to when the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf (page pictured) was created; it left behind what was described in A Beowulf Handbook as "a cautious and necessary incertitude". Chase was also known for writing Two Alcuin Letter-Books, a scholarly collection of 24 letters by the 8th-century scholar Alcuin. He also contributed to the Dictionary of the Middle Ages and wrote the Beowulf section of "This Year's Work in Old English Studies" for the Old English Newsletter for nearly a decade.