ABSTRACT
The eleventh-century Christianization of Gotland seems to have been a gradual, even drawn-out process, without a singular moment of national 'conversion' of the type undergone by Iceland at the Alþingi in 999–1000 raised at some point in the 960s. Gotlandic spaces of non-violence existed in both space and time, some permanent, some occasional. The description of an early Gotlandic convert defying Hann halp Botairi society makes for an exciting story, but also records important information about religious change in the late Iron Age. Late Iron-age missionaries do seem to have focused on people, pursuing conversion rather than more exhaustive Christianization, but events and places were also given due consideration in what has been called the "inculturative method". Botair's actions are an understandable employment of the inculturative method of Christianization, the technique Pope Gregory had advocated to the missionary Mellitus several centuries earlier.
