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First page of Beowulf

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. (Full article...)

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Poster for Captain America (1944)

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... that Alexander the Great occasionally founded cities not named after himself?

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On this day

February 5: Lantern Festival in China (2023); Tu BiShvat begins (Judaism, 2023)

Charles XIV John

1637 – Ninety-eight sales for rare tulip bulbs were recorded on the last day of tulip mania, a speculative bubble in the Dutch Republic.
1818 – Charles XIV John (pictured) succeeded to the thrones of Sweden and Norway as the first monarch of the House of Bernadotte.
1861 – In a speech before the U.S. Congress, Representative John Edward Bouligny refused to join his fellow Louisiana congressmen in heeding the state's secession convention and resigning.
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Philipp Spener (d. 1705)
William Cullen (d. 1790)
Neymar (b. 1992)

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The African grey hornbill (Lophoceros nasutus) is a bird of the hornbill family, which is widespread in much of sub-Saharan Africa and the south-west of the Arabian Peninsula. This female of the subspecies L. n. epirhinus was photographed in Namibia's Etosha National Park.

Photograph credit: Charles J. Sharp

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