Early Medieval / Late Iron Age North-European Swords and Their Use

As I've mentioned repeatedly on my blog, Warhammer 40k is not and does not aspire to be realistic. However, I still find that studying how weapons have been used and designed historically and how they are used and designed now gives me new insight to posing and sculpting my miniatures. Since my main army is inspired by historical (and fictional) Vikings, early Scandinavian sword is a good starting point for this topic for my blog.
I should point out that I'm by no means an expert on this topic, but I have done some reading.

Typically, the Scandinavians used very similar swords to rest of Northern Europe. Most often, they were double-edged, about one meter long cutting weapons with wide blades and a single fuller (also sometimes erroneously called a blood groove). They were nearly always used in conjunction with a fairly large, round and flat centre-gripped shield. The swords and shields changed with time, with Vikings in the late 11th century often using kite shields similar to those made famous by the Normans through the Bayeux tapestry, but for now, I'll focus on one of the more archetypical sword styles (and not on the shields much at all).

 This is a (somewhat crude -- it was drawn quickly, and I haven't drawn anything for quite a while) sketch of a fairly typical Scandinavian or Frankish sword hilt with a five-lobed pommel, widely used for a couple of centuries, up to the 10 century. The grip is characteristically very short, so that an ungloved hand just fits in (as a sidenote, complex metal gauntlets didn't appear until several centuries later). If I imagine Space Wolves using similar weapons, it stands to reason that they would factor in the extra room taken by Power Armour's gauntlets (or even Terminator Armour's, though that would mean warriors in Terminator Armour couldn't use the same swords as they did in Power Armour, unless they had them modified).

There are no known surviving swordfighting treatises from this period in history, but it has been suggested through experimental research that these swords were used by holding the little finger in contact with the pommel. This contact point would then function as a fulcrum point when the blade was swung forward in a relaxed grip. Instead of muscular strength, the power of the sword swing would come from blade acceleration.
Obviously, this would take a lot of training to get the blade alignment right (ie. hitting the target straight on with the edge), but at the time, a sword was a fairly large piece of steel, and the warrior wishing to purchase one would often be a nobleman, who could dedicate his time to practicing fighting instead of doing manual labour.

There were other hilt designs, and some Vikings also used single-edged swords, though, as I understand it, those were always in the minority compared with the double-edged design. Anglo-Saxons also had similar, but still distinct hilt designs on their swords. Also, by the end of 11th century, the typical sword had a small disc pommel that would not facilitate this kind of attack, and there are pommel types that could be considered transitionary between these types, so there were probably many different swordfighting techniques in use by the Vikings.