The TV show Vikings has sparked a large number of questions here, and there's even a section of the FAQ dedicated to the series. As a historian of the period, I'm grateful for all this interest, although the show conflates a lot of things and uses fantasy to fill in the gaps and build a more interesting story line. It's just as likely to mislead as it is to inform. I'd recommend perusing the FAQ and then paging through the longer list of questions previously asked.

With regard to savagery, I'd say that the period was no more or less savage than many other periods I'm familiar with. However, since our writers from the period (monks) were also especially victimized in the viking raids, the vikings and their period seem especially savage in the surviving written sources.

This reported violence is celebrated by a lot of different people today, and for a number of different reasons. In many cases, this might be for the sheer entertainment value pegged to violence in modern culture. Perhaps we don't have coliseums, but try keeping a body count during the average action movie or even the nightly news—as a historian of the Viking Age, it's important to know that violence sells. More insidiously, viking violence is also celebrated either as a successful attack on institutions of church and state or as the manifestation of some sort of mythical heroism inherent to Germanic races. At times, it's been valorized by neo-Nazis or whitewashed by neopagans. From a methodological perspective, I wholeheartedly agree with your instinct to be critical of revivals of Viking Age culture and to scrutinize these revivals as a lens into modern perspectives on violence.

Modern Scandinavians of course have varied responses to this violent history. I've had the pleasure of visiting most major museums in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. In most, it seems that there is a conscious effort to portray the Viking Age as a historical moment—an event rooted in a past place and time, not some sort of fundamental manifestation of Scandinavian culture or ethnicities. There's by and large a sense of detachment from this historical violence, and many modern Scandinavians pride themselves on the lack of violence in their present-day societies. They're more likely to feel connections to the technological and economic entrepreneurship of the age—for example naming new inventions after the Viking Age leader, Harald Bluetooth. There's also a strong sense of local history. Farmers are often very protective of the Viking Age graves found in their fields, and they often take careful interest in if or how archaeologists recover them. This particular type of interest, however, rarely connects to how these local farmers and magnates may have been linked to viking violence abroad.