Harii

The Harii (West Germanic "warriors") were, according to 1st century CE Roman historian Tacitus, a Germanic people. In his work Germania, Tacitus describes them as using black shields and painting their bodies (nigra scuta, tincta corpora), and attacking at night as a shadowy army, much to the terror of their opponents. Theories have been proposed connecting the Harii to the einherjar, ghostly warriors in service to the god Odin, attested much later among the North Germanic peoples by way of Norse mythology, and to the tradition of the Wild Hunt, a procession of the dead through the winter night sky sometimes led by Odin.