As some of the others have commented, Varangur in 2nd ed was effectively a refuge for wfb chaos armies - now mantic are moving the vibe away from that (although perfectly doable with gw stuff).
I’ve done a dark age style Varangur army with historical Saxon, viking and Gallic models (Victrix , gripping beast & warlord respectively) - with a few more fantasy bits thrown in.
Shameless plug!
You can do similar things with other historical ranges - samurai can work nicely for example.
As mentioned above, if going gw the Start Collecting sets are decent value (you basically get the ‘big’ thing free) and you can pick up some of the slightly older models pretty cheap