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.