Berkano

The shape

A vertical stave with two triangles stacked against it on the same side, both closed. It maps cleanly onto Latin B, which puts it alongside Fehu, Ansuz and Raidho in the group of runes that support a Latin or North Italic origin for the script.

The two closed shapes have been read as breasts, and modern practice leans on that heavily for the rune's fertility associations. It is a reading with no support in any source, and the fertility sense arrives perfectly well from the tree without it.

The tree

Betula, the birch, and the reconstruction berkanan is secure: Old English beorc, Old Norse bjǫrk, German Birke, modern English birch, and cognates well outside Germanic including Sanskrit bhūrja.

The birch is a pioneer species, and that is the fact the rune runs on. It is the first tree to colonise cleared, burned or abandoned ground: it tolerates poor soil, grows fast, seeds prolifically, and is short-lived by forest standards. Where a fire or a felling has stripped a hillside, birch is what comes back first, and it prepares the ground for the slower, longer-lived trees that eventually replace it.

In northern Europe it is also the tree of the far north, growing where almost nothing else will. Birch bark is waterproof and was used for containers, for roofing, and, in the Novgorod finds, as a writing surface.

Shoots without seed

The Old English stanza is unusually long, four lines against the usual three, and the whole of it turns on one paradox.

The birch is bleda leas, without fruit. And yet it bears tanas butan tudder, shoots without seed. Then the stanza spends its remaining lines on how beautiful it is: fine in its branches, high in its crown, adorned, laden with leaves, pressing close to the sky.

What the poem is describing, in its own terms, is growth that does not come from the expected mechanism. Birch produces catkins rather than obvious fruit, and it also regenerates readily from the base and from suckers, so a felled birch comes back without anything having been planted.

As an image for a rune, that is precise and worth keeping. Berkano is not the harvest, which is Jera and requires the whole cycle. It is growth that starts anyway, from nothing visible, before conditions justify it.

Loki in the Norwegian stanza

The Norwegian poem pairs the birch with a line about Loki bringing the luck of deceit, which appears to have nothing to do with it.

That is normal for the Norwegian poem, whose second lines are frequently unrelated proverbs or mnemonic fillers chosen for alliteration and rhyme rather than sense. Bjarkan and bar alliterate; líma and tíma rhyme. The construction is doing metrical work.

Attempts to read a deep connection between birch and Loki are reaching. The Icelandic stanza, which has no such constraint, simply gives three descriptions of a small young tree and leaves it there.

In inscriptions

As the letter b it appears throughout the corpus in ordinary vocabulary and names.

There is no attested use of Berkano as a birth-charm or fertility-charm in the Elder Futhark record. The Sigrdrífumál does contain an instruction about bjargrúnar, helping-runes or birth-runes, to be carved on the palm to aid a woman in labour, and modern practice often connects that to this rune on the basis of the sound. The Old Norse bjarg- element means help or deliverance, not birch, so the connection is a homophone rather than an etymology. The text is also thirteenth-century Icelandic literature about a legendary past.

In reading, upright

Berkano is beginnings, and specifically small ones.

In a spread it marks something starting: a project in its first weeks, a relationship at the point where it might become something, a recovery beginning after illness or collapse. Literal birth and pregnancy are the most direct reading and are often correct when the question is on that subject.

The pioneer quality is what distinguishes it from the other growth runes. Berkano does not wait for good conditions. It reads as growth taking hold on ground that has been cleared, burned or wrecked, which makes it one of the more encouraging runes to find after a difficult stretch. It is the first thing back.

It is also, by the same token, modest. Birch is short-lived and it is not the tree that ends up standing there. Berkano rarely means the final outcome. It means something has started and it is viable, which after Hagalaz or Naudhiz is usually the more useful information.

In reading, reversed

Berkano reverses.

Inverted it is growth that will not take. A false start, a project that begins and does not root, a recovery that stalls. In questions about pregnancy and family it can be difficult, and is worth handling carefully rather than pronounced on.

The other reversed reading is smothering. Nurture that has become control, care that prevents growth rather than supporting it, a person kept small by being looked after. The birch's virtue is that it takes hold on its own; reversed Berkano often marks a situation where something is being cultivated so hard it cannot establish.

Modern esoteric layers

The Frigg and Nerthus attributions, the element, and the strong maternal reading all come from the twentieth-century revival, principally Thorsson and Aswynn.

The reading of the rune's shape as breasts, and the associated framing of Berkano as the mother rune or the goddess rune, is entirely modern. The fertility sense is defensible from the tree itself and does not need it.

Birch does have genuine ritual associations in later European folk practice, including in Slavic and Baltic spring customs and in the birch besom. Those are real traditions and they are not evidence about the Elder Futhark, which went out of use centuries before any of them are recorded.

With other runes

Berkano with Jera (ᛃ) is the full growth sequence: something starting, and a cycle that will bring it in.

Berkano with Ingwaz (ᛜ) is the pairing modern practice uses for gestation and for potential that is stored rather than active. Both runes are about something not yet visible.

Berkano with Hagalaz (ᚺ) is damage to something young, and often the sharpest warning in a spread about a new project.

Berkano with Eihwaz (ᛇ) sets the two trees against each other: the fast pioneer and the tree that outlives everything. It usually marks a choice between quick growth and slow permanence.

Berkano with Fehu (ᚠ) shifts to increase in the material sense, herds and holdings growing rather than a person or a project.