Why is everybody obsessed with vikings? Huge demand for movies and games about a bunch or brutal barbarians who wore stone-age clothes, wielded crude iron swords and lived in huts made out of straw and mud. Beauty and high culture were foreign to them, and yet they completely overshadow, say, byzantium, or ancient china, or etruscans, or assyrians or indonesians. Even other cool barbarians cultures, like kazakhs or apaches get no love, but vikings do.