"The first tree of the series is the self-propagating birch. Birch twigs are used throughout Europe in the beating of bounds and the flogging of delinquents - and formerly lunatics - with the object of expelling evil spirits ... Birch rods are also used in rustic ritual for driving out the spirit of the old year ...

The birch is a tree of inception. It is indeed the earliest forest tree, with the exception of the mysterious elder, to put out new leaves ... and in Scandinavia its leafing marks the beginning of the agricultural year, because farmers use it as a directory for sowing their Spring wheat ..." (The White Goddess)

Rusalka, a 1968 painting by Konstantin Vasiliev

"The birch is considered a national tree of Russia, where it used to be worshipped as a goddess during the Green Week in early June." "Semik is an ancient Russian fertility festival celebrated in early June and closely linked with the cult of the dead and the spring agricultural rites. It usually fell upon the Thursday of the Green Week (better known as Trinity Week in Russia and the Whitsuntide week in Britain). Its name is derived from the Slavic word for "seven", because the Green Week was the seventh (sometimes the eighth) week after Easter. The end of Semik inaugurated the celebrations of the Trinity Sunday.

The Rusalki were believed to be at their most dangerous during the Green Week (Russian: русальная неделя), and were supposed to have left their watery depths in order to swing on branches of birch and willow trees at night. Peasant women sometimes hung offerings to appease them. A cross, a magic circle, incense, garlic, wormwood, a pin or poker and verbal charms were used to render the rusalki harmless. Swimming was strictly forbidden, lest mermaids would drag the swimmer down to the river floor.

On Semik, funeral services were held for those who had not received a proper burial. Peasants decorated the insides and outsides of their houses with birch branches, and they selected a birch tree to decorate with ribbons and beads. The birch was usually left in the forest, but was sometimes brought into the village. The birch (referred to as 'semik', just like the holiday itself) was seen as a symbol of vegetative power and stood as a focal point for girls' singing and dancing. Vows of eternal friendship were made here. Like Kostroma during Maslenitsa, this fertility symbol was destroyed at the end of the festivities. Usually, it was drowned 'in order to provide the needed rainfall for the sprouting crops'." (Wikipedia)

"The second tree is the quickbeam ('tree of life'), otherwise known as the quicken, rowan, or mountain ash. Its round wattles, spread with newly-flayed bull's hides, were used by the Druids as a last extremity for compelling demons to answer difficult questions - hence the Irish proverbial expression 'to go on the wattles of knowledge', meaning to do one's utmost to get information ... The quickbeam is also the tree most widely used in the British Isles as a prophylactic against lightning and witches' charms of all sorts: for example, bewitched horses can be controlled only with a rowan whip.

In ancient Ireland, fires of rowan were kindled by the Druids of opposing armies and incantations spoken over them, summoning spirits to take part in the fight. The berries of the magical rowan in the Irish romance of Fraoth, guarded by a dragon, had the sustaining virtue of nine meals; they also healed the wounded and added a year to a man's life.

In the romance of Diarmuid and Grainne, the rowan berry, with the apple and the red nut, is described as the food of the gods. 'Food of the gods' suggests that the taboo on eating anything red was an extension of the commoners' taboo on eating scarlet toadstools - for toadstools, according to a Greek proverb which Nero quoted, were 'the food of the gods'. In ancient Greece all red foods such as lobster, bacon, red mullet, crayfish and scarlet berries and fruit were tabooed except at feasts in honour of the dead. (Red was the colour of death in Greece and Britain during the Bronze Age - red ochre has been found in megalithic burials both in the Prescelly Mountains and on Salisbury Plain.)

The quickbeam is the tree of quickening. Its botanical name Fraxinus, or Pyrus, Aucuparia, conveys its divinatory uses. Another of its names is 'the witch'; and the witch-wand, formerly used for metal divining, was made of rowan. Since it was the tree of quickening it could also be used in a contrary sense. In Danaan Ireland a rowan-stake hammered through a corpse immobilized its ghost; and in the Cuchulain saga three hags spitted a dog, Cuchulain's sacred animal, on rowan twigs to procure his death.

The oracular use of the rowan explains the unexpected presence of great rowan thickets in Rügen and the other Baltic amber-islands, formerly used as oracular places, and the frequent occurence of rowan ... in the neighbourhood of ancient stone circles.

The important Celtic feast of Candlemas fell in the middle of it [the Rowan period]. It was held to mark the quickening of the year, and was the first of the four 'cross-quarter days' on which British witches celebrated their Sabbaths, the others being May Eve, Lammas (August 2nd) and All Hallow E'en, when the year died ..." (The White Goddess)

"The name 'rowan' is derived from the Old Norse name for the tree, raun or rogn. Linguists believe that the Norse name is ultimately derived from a proto-Germanic word *raudnian meaning 'getting red' and which referred to the red foliage and red berries in the autumn. Rowan is one of the most familiar wild trees in the British Isles, and has acquired numerous English folk names. The following are recorded folk names for the rowan: Delight of the eye (Luisliu), Mountain ash, Quickbane, Quickbeam, Quicken (tree), Quickenbeam, Ran tree, Roan tree, Roden-quicken, Roden-quicken-royan, Round wood, Royne tree, Rune tree, Sorb apple, Thor's helper, Whispering tree, Whitty, Wicken-tree, Wiggin, Wiggy, Wiky, Witch wood, Witchbane, Witchen, Witchen tree. Many of these can be easily linked to the mythology and folklore surrounding the tree. In Gaelic, it is Rudha-an (red one, pronounced quite similarly to English 'rowan')." (Wikipedia)

"The third tree is the ash. In Greece the ash was sacred to Poseidon, the second god of the Achaean trinity, and the Mĕliai, or ash-spirits, were much cultivated; according to Hesiod, the Mĕliai sprang from the blood of Uranus when Cronos castrated him ...

A descendant of the Sacred Tree of Creevna, also an ash, was still standing at Killura in the nineteenth century; its wood was a charm against drowning, and emigrants to America after the Potato Famine carried it away with them piecemeal ... In British folklore the ash is a tree of re-birth ... naked children had formerly been passed through cleft pollard ashes before sunrise as a cure for rupture ... The Druidical wand with a spiral decoration, part of a recent Anglesey find dating from the early first century A.D., was of ash. The great ash Ygdrasill, sacred to Woden, or Wotan or Odin or Gwydion ... ´he had taken the tree over from the Triple Goddess who, as the Three Norns of Scandinavian legend, dispensed justice under it.

Poseidon retained his patronage of horses but also became a god of seafarers when the Achaeans took to the sea; as Woden did when his people took to the sea. In ancient Wales and Ireland all oars and coracle-slats were made of ash; and so were the rods used for urging on horses, except when the deadly yew was preferred.

The cruelty of the ash ... lies in the harmfulness of its shade to grass or corn; the alder on the contrary is beneficial to crops grown in its shade. So Odin's own Runic alphabet all the letters of which are formed from ash-twigs; as ash-roots strangle those of other forest trees.

The ash is the tree of sea-power, or of the power resident in water; and the other name of Woden, 'Yggr', from which Ygdrasill is derived, is evidently connected with hygra, the Greek for 'sea' (literally, 'the wet element'). The third month is the month of floods and extends from February 18th to March 17th. In these first three months the nights are longer than the days, and the sun is regarded as still under the tutelage of Night. The Tyrrhenians on this account did not reckon them as part of the sacred year." (The White Goddess)

(Wikipedia)

Song which may be good and decent (rîu rivariva), or bad and indecent (rîu rakerake); the term rîu is often used for serious, sad songs: rîu tagi mo te matu'a ana mate, sad song for the death of a father. Vanaga.

Small skin tumours, pimples. Vanaga.

To remember with sorrow, to miss, to pine for (mo); ananake te raá he topatagi te ûka riva ko Uho mo toona ga matu'a, Ko Uho the good girl missed her parents every day. Vanaga.

Grief. Churchill.

Brightness, bright, to lighten, to brighten up; ku ma'eha-á, it has already lightened up. Vanaga.

1. Light, brightness; to shine, to be bright, to glimmer, to glow; maeha mahina, moonshine; maeharaa, sunrise. Maehamaeha, bright. Hakamaeha, to brighten. Mq.: maeoeo, bright, transparent. 2. To get out of the way. 3. Thin, slender, slight. Churchill.