EN (English)
ᛒ
Bjarkan
birch, a birch twig
Something young and green that has taken hold on cleared ground
- Sound
- b /b/, /p/, /ɸ/
- Position
- 13
- Group
- Týr's ætt
- Descended from
- Elder Futhark Berkano (*berkanan)
- Short-twig form
- ᛓ
- Unicode
- U+16D2
- Timing
- Early spring; the first growth
- Yes / No
- Yes, and it is small yet
Upright
- growth
- new life
- spring
- birth
- a young thing
- renewal
- greenness
- a small beginning
In the rune poems
Bjarkan er laufgrønstr líma; Loki bar flærða tíma.
The birch is the greenest-leaved of branches; Loki was fortunate in his deceit.
Bjarkan er laufgat lim ok lítit tré ok ungsamligr viðr. abies buðlungr.
The birch is a leafy twig, a little tree, and a fresh young shrub. Fir; prince.
Across the scripts
ᛒ
Berkano
The ancestor. Its Old English stanza is the longest of the three and turns on a paradox: the birch is fruitless yet bears shoots without seed.
ᛒ
Bjarkan
Younger Futhark
Unchanged, and now covering p as well as b since Perthro was dropped from the row.
ᛒ
The first tree back
Birch is a pioneer species and that is the whole substance of the rune.
It takes poor soil, grows fast, seeds heavily, and colonises ground that has been burned, felled or abandoned before any other tree will. It is short-lived by forest standards and it is not what ends up standing there; it prepares the ground for the slower trees that replace it. In the far north it grows where almost nothing else does, and Icelandic birkiskógur, birch scrub, was the island's only native woodland.
Both Norse stanzas emphasise youth and smallness rather than fertility. The Icelandic gives three kennings and all three say the same thing: laufgat lim, a leafy twig; lítit tré, a little tree; ungsamligr viðr, a fresh young shrub. The Norwegian calls it laufgrønstr líma, the greenest-leaved of branches.
None of them describes a mother, a goddess or a womb. That reading belongs to the twentieth-century revival.
Loki's deceit
The Norwegian second line is one of the poem's genuine puzzles: Loki bar flærða tíma, Loki was fortunate in his deceit, or Loki bore the luck of treachery.
The metrical explanation is straightforward, líma against tíma. But readers have looked for a connection for a long time, and the usual candidate is Baldr.
In that story Frigg extracts an oath from every thing in the world not to harm her son, and overlooks only the mistletoe as too young to swear. Loki learns of the omission, makes a dart of it, and has the blind god Höðr throw it. Baldr dies. The chain of events turns entirely on a plant being small and young enough to seem harmless.
That maps onto a stanza about a little tree and a fresh young shrub, and it would be a very Norse joke: a rune about harmless new growth, paired with the most consequential harmless young plant in the mythology.
It is a reading, not a demonstration. The poem may simply have needed a rhyme.
A birch is not a fir
The Icelandic Latin gloss says abies, which is a fir, not a birch. The rune's name and all three of its own kennings say birch.
This is worth flagging because it is the clearest error in the Icelandic glosses and it shows what they are. The glosses were added by scribes working with a Latin vocabulary, mapping Norse words onto classical ones, and here the scribe reached for a generic tree rather than the right one. Elsewhere the same apparatus produces Jupiter for Óðinn and Mars for Týr, which are considered identifications, and aurum for gold, which is exact.
The glosses are a medieval scholarly layer on top of the poem. They are useful evidence about how Icelandic scribes were reading their own tradition, and they are not part of the rune.
In reading
Bjarkan is a beginning that has taken hold and is still small.
It marks the early stage of something: a project in its first weeks, a relationship becoming something, a recovery starting after collapse. Literal birth and pregnancy are the most direct reading and are frequently right when the question is on that subject.
The pioneer quality distinguishes it from Ár. Ár is the harvest, the return on a full cycle. Bjarkan is growth taking hold on ground that has been cleared or wrecked, before conditions justify it, and it is one of the more encouraging runes to draw after Hagall or Kaun.
Its limitation is in the stanzas. A leafy twig, a little tree, a fresh young shrub. Bjarkan does not describe an outcome, and reading it as one overstates what it says. It means something has started and is viable, which after a bad stretch is usually the more useful information.
As a letter
Long-branch ᛒ, short-twig ᛓ, which opens the lower triangle out.
It covers /b/, /p/ and the bilabial fricative, having taken over p when Perthro was dropped. When the dotted runes arrived, a dot gave ᛔ for /p/ and separated them again.
Questions to sit with
- What has started recently that is still too small to defend?
- Are you treating a beginning as though it were a result?
- Birch takes ground nothing else will. What are you growing on wrecked ground?
Frequently asked questions
Latest Posts
Discover the ancient wisdom of tarot cards and unlock the mysteries of your spiritual journey. Our blog is your gateway to understanding the rich symbolism, meanings, and practical applications of tarot reading.
