Berkano
birch•birth•renewal
In the poems the rune is called: beorc (Old English) bjarkan (Norwegian, Icelandic) sound «b» ᛒ
Berkano comes when something new and tender is beginning.
The meaning
Berkano is the birch: the first tree to leaf after winter, the first green to rise from burned ground. Whatever begins, begins here. It is the rune of birth and becoming: new work, new life, healing, the slow hidden growth that goes on long before any visible spring. This is a nurturing, motherly rune, patient and fiercely protective of things too young to defend themselves. It favours tending, sheltering, and letting the fragile thing grow at its own quiet pace until it is strong enough to meet the wind.
A modern reading, grounded in the poems below.
Reversed
Reversed, Berkano is growth stalled or care withheld. A beginning left neglected until it withers, a new thing exposed too soon and bruised, or all your care spent on everyone but yourself. The life-giving force has not vanished. It has been aimed everywhere except where it is needed. Turn some of that gentleness back toward your own beginnings. You cannot shelter others from a place that is itself untended.
Reversed readings are a modern practice.
For you
What new thing in you is still too fragile to show?
The poems
Beorc byþ bleda leas, bereþ efne swa ðeah
tanas butan tudder, biþ on telgum wlitig,
heah on helme hrysted fægere,
geloden leafum, lyfte getenge.
The poplar bears no fruit. Even so it puts out
shoots without seed. It is lovely in its branches,
high in its crown and finely decked,
loaded with leaves, and it reaches the sky.
why the poem never names it
The poem never names the rune. Each stanza is a riddle whose answer is the name, and the name printed above it in every edition was put there by a later hand.
Bjarkan er laufgrønstr líma;
Loki bar flærða tíma.
No branch leafs greener than the birch.
Loki’s lie found its hour.
on the rhyme
The Norwegian poem is written in rhyming couplets. The second line rhymes with the first, and often that is the strongest thing connecting them. Dickins calls each couplet two semi-detached statements of a gnomic character.
Bjarkan er laufgat lim
ok lítit tré
ok ungsamligr viðr.
gloss abies buðlungr
Birch: a leafy branch,
a little tree,
and fresh young wood.
on the last two words
Each Icelandic stanza ends with two words the poem does not need. One is a Latin equivalent of the rune name, the other an Old Norse word for king beginning with the same letter. The manuscript is running a glossary and an alphabetical king-list through the poem at the same time.
where these texts come from
The earliest surviving list of this row was written in the ninth century, and it says nothing about what any rune means. Abecedarium Nordmannicum, 9th century.
Text after Dickins 1915. Checked against Halsall 1981. Translated here from the originals.
Where it comes from
Birch is the pioneer tree. It is the first to take root on land that fire or flood has stripped bare. Its pale bark rises like a flag of return where nothing else will yet grow. It makes the soil ready for the greater trees that follow. The northern peoples brought birch branches indoors at the spring festivals to carry the new season over the threshold, and tied them to cradles and doorways for protection. Berkano opens every cycle the way birch opens every forest: gently, first, and without asking permission.
Dickins does not translate the English stanza as birch. He writes that the customary meaning is unsuitable here and that the glossaries allow poplar, and his reason is the stanza itself. It describes a tree that bears no fruit and puts out shoots without seed. That is true of the grey poplar and not of the birch, and the poplar reaches the height the last line needs. So the English poem may not be about the same tree as the two Norse ones. That is written here as Dickins argues, not as fact.
The Latin beside the Icelandic stanza is abies, fir, which is not a birch either. That is now three glosses that disagree with the verse they sit under, with rota on Sowilo and Jupiter on Ansuz. The Latin column was not copied from the poem beside it.
Dickins also notes that ungsamligr in the third Icelandic line is found neither in old nor in modern Icelandic, and that Bugge reads vegsamligr, glorious, instead. Our translation follows the manuscript and says so.
Loki in the Norwegian second line is the clearest case in the poem of a rhyme choosing the content. Dickins takes it as Loki's part in Balder's death and concedes the line is not perhaps very satisfactory. It is also the most misread line of the poem on the modern internet.