Rodney Edvinsson årets mottagare av Heckscher-priset

Motiveringen: [engelska]

"The Heckscher Prize for Best Paper in Scandinavian Economic History Review is awarded to Rodney Edvinsson who over the years have contributed to SHER with many papers and as a reviewer. The price is however for the pest paper published in 2025 for his article “Applying a Transaction Cost Perspective to Decode Viking Scandinavia’s Earliest Recorded Value Relation: Insights from the Forsa Ring’s Runic Inscription.

In this innovative and thought-provoking contribution, Edvinsson demonstrates how economic history can generate new insights beyond the traditional boundaries of the field. By combining economic reasoning with careful historical analysis, he revisits one of the most discussed inscriptions from Viking Age Scandinavia and offers a compelling reinterpretation of its meaning.

Previous scholarship has generally understood the inscription as prescribing fines to be paid in both silver and oxen. Edvinsson instead applies a transaction cost perspective and argues that the text is more plausibly interpreted as allowing payment in either silver or oxen. This seemingly small distinction has important implications. Under his interpretation, the implied relative values of silver and cattle correspond closely to those known from contemporary written sources in England. The finding suggests a remarkable degree of market integration and consistency in relative prices across Northern Europe during the Viking Age. While the traditional one, that a person fined should sell some oxen to get silver, or buy oxen if he had silver would not really make sense.

The article exemplifies the strengths of economic history at its best: the use of economic concepts and methods to shed new light on historical questions and to challenge established interpretations. By demonstrating how transaction cost reasoning can help decode an early medieval legal inscription, Edvinsson uncovers evidence of market relationships that had previously gone unnoticed and provides a fresh perspective on the economic organization of Viking Scandinavia."