Berkano

The rune’s Proto-Germanic name is reconstructed as *berkanan, “birch”. No early source writes the name in that form, so it is a scholarly reconstruction, and the exact form may have changed over time. The later traditions agree closely on the meaning, though: Old English beorc or berc, Old Norse bjarkan, and bercna as the name of the Gothic letter in a late eighth-century manuscript associated with Alcuin of York. Dickins points out that Old English glossaries also use the word for the poplar.

The rune stood for the sound b; in early Norse it could probably also stand for a soft, v-like b. Its shape, two triangles or loops against an upright stave, is widely agreed to come from the Latin or Old Italic letter B.

It appears in every early listing of the futhark. On the Kylver Stone from Gotland, a grave slab dated by its cemetery to about 400 AD and the oldest known complete row of the 24 runes, it stands eighteenth, between t and e, and is carved facing the other way from the later standard form. The Grumpan bracteate (about 500) and the sixth-century Vadstena and Mariedamm bracteates, which divide the row into three groups of eight, place it second in the third group.

The rune survived both later reforms. In the Younger Futhark it is bjarkan, the thirteenth of sixteen runes, used for both b and p, in a long-branch form (ᛒ) and a short-twig form (ᛓ). From the twelfth century a dotted form (ᛔ) was sometimes used to mark p. In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc it kept its shape and sound as beorc.

Swedish rune scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries collected names and short sayings for the runes. Here the rune is called birkal or similar names. Johannes Bureus recorded a short Swedish kenning for it in 1599, roughly “birch buds most flourishing”, and Nicolaus Granius (1600) one about the greenest birch grove; Olaus Verelius (1675), Georg Stiernhielm (1685) and Olof Rudbeck (1698) also recorded forms of it. These are early modern learned collections, not old sources.

When the Austrian writer Guido von List published his “Armanen” rune row (an article in 1906, a book in 1908), he based it on the Younger Futhark plus two runes of his own. This rune appears there as Bar, thirteenth in the row. List claimed the runes had been revealed to him in 1902; the system is his own invention.

Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes (first published in 1983 with a set of 24 rune stones and a blank one) brought rune divination to a wide public. Its name for this rune is Berkana, and the meanings it gives are Blum’s own.