In regards to Vikings and Spartans, etc, I would say there is appropriation here nonetheless, the appropriation of legacy. The whole notion of "Western thought" is an appropriated amalgam: we are not Greek (and many Anglo European cultures have reject the notion of Grecians being "white" to varying degrees, but we still use "deep time" to anchor ourselves, justify ourselves. In this way, we don't have to justify that we are "creating something new." Christianity may be the best case in point: it anchors itself to the ancientness of the Torah, yet contradicts its history at will, but this doesn't matter, the anchor remains.
The two can coexist. We can claim others' past glories as our own, and celebrate "our" own. (And in the cultural sense the conquering of the Americas is something that is celebrated, the overcoming of the "Indian as Other to the American self," as I once heard it put.
The thing I keep thinking about, in regards to this subject, is there seems an implicit backhandedness even in the case of honor. It could be argued we do the same with animals, take the image of the powerful thing that could kill us, and totemize it. However, the two things implicit here are that we respect it because we fear it and, conversely, we honor it after we have beaten it (and perhaps especially because we have beaten it); we honor the spirit of the wolf by dancing around a fire with the hide of one turned into a headdress.