Talk:Three Bladed Knife/@comment-175.36.147.204-20191124233715

The other comments have pointed out what this thing actually is, but another note is that something like this was actually something of a rarity. Getting this made in the Renaissance was expensive due to the work involved in getting the springs and such made. This style of parrying dagger was more of a novelty for the nobility. Functional, certainly, but expensive and probably just as expensive to get fixed if one of the springs or other fittings got broken.

A more common form of parrying dagger was actually just a normal dagger but with a much wider guard (more like the guard off a longsword) - aside from working perfectly well to parry an opponent's sword, it means you also get to have a properly-sharp blade on it. The three-pronged one can't really be sharpened properly - the side prongs are too thin to really hold and edge and you can't put an edge on the centre part at all while still being able to fold the weapon up, not to mention that getting blood into the mechanisms would require dismantling the thing entirely to clean it.