@bybeach: I don't mean to "actually" you here, but that's a really limited and uneducated view of Viking civilization to say they held Europe back perhaps for 200 years.
Edit: Reading a reply you made to another post, you know Western Europeans didn't sit back and just let Vikings raid them. They adapted and changed to the times like people always have and always will. Viking raids were not so widespread that they stopped progress. And you want to talk about representative democracy? Vikings were more democratic than any European kingdom at the time.
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