Dark age or just imagination?

I've been reviewing various images of supposed dark age Grecian warriors. It strikes me that we have a reasonable model for the supposed dark age, in the supposed dark ages of Western Europe. 

Imagine that there were no Christian clerics to record proceedings in that period, or that what writings there were, got destroyed. Then imagine that instead of the many accounts more or less contemporary with that "long fallow night" we have only a series of secondary accounts, all based on Danish, Swedish and Norse skaldic traditions and not committed to writing for hundreds of years.

I hope I don't need to keep drawing out this mental exercise? With what has been more and more revealed about the supposed dark ages, it is hard to maintain that there was such a thing. I believe exactly the same will eventually be admitted about that much earlier break in a sequence.