The Hart.

Legends abound about the rare white hart in English folklore, and many villages in England boast a pub by the name of The White Hart. We stumbled upon several such pubs on a trip to the Cotswolds in 2016 – a trip that served as a huge inspiration for so much about The Hare and The Hart. The White Hart pub in the second photo above is in Stow on the Wold, a stone’s throw from where we stayed in Lower Oddington.

In more current mythology, think of Harry’s Patronus in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, or the white stag that the Pevensie children hunted as kings and queens toward the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series.

So, now we’ve established that the word “hart” does not mean a vital organ, nor does it mean a symbol of love. Hand over heart (pun intended!), I frequently have needed to spell out our 4-letter surname because it gets misspelled more times than not. But it truly is a fun last name to have!