The more accurate term might be "peninsular and island Northwest European" (call'em PINEs for short)--NOT "Germanic". When you start talking about Vikings vs. Anglo-Saxon, things get VERY intertwined as to which was the chicken and which the egg. Whether the Vikings were more the originators than the means of transmission and cross-fertilization, I'm not sure we will ever know.
Greece and Rome get "good press" because they HAD "the press" (i.e. a history based on writing rather than oral memory and tradition). I simply feel that the "PINEs" contribution to the Western cultural tradition of individual liberty and representative government is under-appreciated.
In the popular media of today, PINEs are depicted as dirty, bearskin-wearing, barbarians, (kind of the way Southerners are depicted--minus the bearskins) which recent archeological work has shown was most definitely NOT the case.