I never said that Chain rendered the knife useless, just that it mitigates the effectiveness. Of course you can still slash the neck, or get under the mail shirt into the groin, but these are much harder targets to get to. Defending the neck is easier than defending the armpit or belly, and in order to get under a chain shirt safely (without exposing yourself to attack) you need to have almost knocked your opponent off their feet or somehow have them grappled.
And NO NO NO. A knife CANNOT pierce through chain. The ONLY knife in history that I know of that can do this is a rondel dagger because they ultra-specialized it just for that purpose.
Unless an apache has a knife like THIS, with a piercing point so acute that it slips inside one of the rings and busts it, it CANNOT get through chain.
This is one of my most frustrating pet peeves and common misunderstandings about chainmail, that it can be so easily pierced. Go onto Youtube and find a video of someone "proving" that weapon 1, 2, or 3 can pierce chain. When you do, take a GOOD look at the chain in question.
Does it look like this?
Or does it look like this?
The first of those images is what is almost always used and it is NOT historical in the slightest. The links are not held together by anything and you can pull them apart by just pulling on them hard enough. In the second image, the rings are either solid circles, or the rings are riveted shut. And riveted mail can turn WAR SPEARS. No knife is getting through that.
Again, I am NOT saying that the knives are useless. Obviously there are places where the viking won't be armored. Even against a knight in full plate the knife wouldn't be useless (you can jam it through the helmet's visor, or even rip the visor off after you bring him to the ground in a grapple), but that chain DOES mitigate a lot of the Apache's superior knife skills, and the vikings still had excellent grappling techniques and their own knives to fall back on. I'm just saying that it isn't clear-cut at knife range. And even that is assuming that the Apache can get past the bow, the shield, and the sword in order to get into that range, which is very difficult to do.
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