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 twenty-four 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 composed. The Old English poem, surviving in 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 started 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 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 period. Seeing early lives which appeared "to avoid and even suppress significant exploitation" of heroic culture and values, and later lives that 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 and death ==