The small boat was part of the offering.

The “small boat” was not a romantic image first. For the early Celtic and Irish monks, the sea was a discipline: cold, uncertain, and physically dangerous. Some left their own kin and country as peregrini pro Christo, pilgrims for Christ, accepting exile as part of the offering. To cross in a narrow craft was to surrender comfort, reputation, and control, with little protection from weather, distance, or the limits of the vessel.

That is why the old island pilgrimages still feel severe. Bardsey was reached only by water, and its holiness was never separate from the difficulty of arrival. The monks and pilgrims who went before did not choose ease as the sign of faithfulness. They chose return, rhythm, exposure, and the ordinary discipline of continuing.

It is at least possible to hear a distant echo of this in Tolkien's Peregrin Took. Tolkien used names with care, and Peregrin comes from the same Latin root as pilgrim: a foreigner, a wanderer, one who goes abroad. That does not prove he had the seafaring monks specifically in mind. But it does make the name feel less accidental for a small, home-loving person drawn into a hard journey beyond the borders of his own country.

Background: Bardsey Island Trust on Enlli's spiritual history, and historical work on Irish peregrinatio. Tolkien background: Peregrin as a translation of Razanur and as a name rooted in Latin peregrinus.