Bjarkan

Bjarkan's two stanzas open on the same botanical image, the birch as greenest of leaved shrubs in the Norwegian poem's phrasing, matching the Old English Beorc stanza's own admiration for the tree's vigorous growth, but the Norwegian poem then takes a genuinely surprising turn, closing with a line noting that Loki was fortunate in his deceit, an allusion to the trickster god of Norse mythology whose schemes, in the wider mythological corpus, sometimes succeeded and sometimes brought disaster on the gods, most catastrophically in his role in Baldr's death, a connection between a modest tree and one of Norse mythology's most consequential and morally ambiguous figures that the stanza offers without explanation.

The Icelandic poem takes the more restrained route, staying entirely with the tree itself across its whole stanza, a leafy twig, a small tree and youthful wood, an image of modest, unassuming growth with none of the Norwegian poem's mythological detour. Dickins' 1915 edition notes the Loki reference as one of the more genuinely puzzling allusions in either poem, since no other surviving source directly connects Loki to the birch or to bjarkan specifically, leaving the association's original logic, whatever it was, effectively lost to the modern reader.

Bjarkan is the thirteenth of the sixteen Younger Futhark runes, descending from Berkano, the Elder Futhark's own eighteenth rune, its core meaning of the birch tree carried forward closely, matching the same stability the Old English Beorc shows relative to its own Elder Futhark ancestor, botanical images generally surviving reinterpretation better across every runic tradition this survey has covered than more abstract concepts such as Ur's dross or drizzle.

Barnes' handbook notes Bjarkan's sound value b as absorbing, like several of the row's other consonants, both the voiced b and unvoiced p sounds of Old Norse, a single sign covering a phonetic pair the spoken language kept distinct, the same pattern of deliberate economy already noted for Kaun's k and g, and Tyr's t and d. Bjarkan's position thirteenth of sixteen places it within the row's final third, following Tyr and preceding only Madr, Lögr and Yr before the sixteen rune sequence closes. Barnes notes that Bjarkan's continued botanical reading across every runic tradition surveyed here, alongside Isa's ice and Sol's sun, places it among the small group of Younger Futhark signs whose Elder Futhark meaning needed essentially no reinterpretation at all to remain current for a medieval Norwegian or Icelandic audience centuries later.