Harii

The Harii (West Germanic "warriors")^[1] were, according to a single brief remark by the 1st century CE Roman historian Tacitus, a Germanic people the most powerful of the Lugian group of states (civitates), who in turn dominated a large part of the Suebian part of Germania in an area north of the Sudeten and Carpathian Mountains, in the region of present day Poland and eastern Germany.

In his work Germania, Tacitus says the Harii used black shields and painting their bodies black (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.