Oldest Champions in LoL: 10 Picks Who Are Older Than You Think

Ten champions who are older than the nations they stand in, counted down to the one who predates most of the sky.

Some of these were already ancient when the rest of the roster's history started.

Oldest Champions in LoL

10 Picks Who Are Older Than You Think

Runeterra Lore

Ten champions who are older than the nations they stand in, counted down to the one who predates most of the sky.

Some of these were already ancient when the rest of the roster's history started.

Runeterra's timeline is much deeper than the wars anybody talks about, and a decent number of champions were around for the parts nobody wrote down. Counting down by how long each one has been around. The dates are Runeterra's own.

#10: Vladimir

~1,500-3,000 years

Vladimir presents as a Noxian socialite with expensive taste, and he's been doing exactly that for centuries (somewhere between fifteen and thirty of them). He was at the parties before this empire, and he'll be at whatever replaces it.

Noxus has burned through kings, generals and entire political systems while he stood at the edge of the room holding a drink. The events its historians still argue about are things he personally attended.

#9: Malphite

~3,000-3,500 years

A war nobody was alive to record shattered a monolith, and Malphite is one of the pieces. He's a fragment of something that was already there.

His whole story is loneliness on a geological scale. The thing he came from is gone, everything that remembered it is gone, and a shard of rock walks Runeterra looking for anything else that lasted.

#8: Rammus

4,400+ years

Rammus is treated as a punchline and is quietly among the strangest things in the setting. Shuriman legend has him predating the desert cities, and nobody can agree on what he is or where he came from.

He also won't say. Something older than the empire is rolling around the desert answering every question with two syllables ("OK.").

#7: Ivern

~9,000-10,000 years

Ivern was a Freljordian raider who cut down the wrong tree and got a very long lesson out of it. He's been a walking forest ever since, and he's cheerful about it in a way that only makes sense after a few thousand years of practice.

The detail that sells his age is how little urgency he has. Nothing in Runeterra is happening fast enough for Ivern to hurry, because he's watched this particular argument between mortals several times already.

#6: Tahm Kench

10,000+ years

Tahm Kench is a demon (in Runeterra, something that forms out of a human feeling and then never stops). He's been collecting people's worst decisions for as long as people have been making them.

He doesn't age at all, in either direction. Demons predate the empires and outlast them, and he treats every kingdom he's ever wandered through as roughly the same length of anecdote.

#5: Anivia

10,000+ years

Anivia is a Freljordian demigod who dies and is reborn on a cycle (which technically resets her age and absolutely doesn't reset her memory). The tribes have been telling stories about her for as long as they've had stories.

She's a continuous thing the Freljord has always had, and the ancestors of the current tribes arrived to find her already a legend.

#4: Volibear

10,000+ years

Before anybody in the Freljord agreed to be ruled by anything, Volibear was one of its old gods, and he's furious about everything that has happened since. All of it. Civilization is the insult he's still responding to, and everything that made the Freljord habitable happened after him and largely against his advice.

#3: Ornn

10,000+ years

Ornn is the demigod who was building things under the mountain while the others argued about worship, and he's still down there, working, refusing to be involved.

Half the legendary objects in the Freljord came out of his forge. The artifacts other champions treat as priceless relics are (to him) older work he'd rather not discuss.

#2: Fiddlesticks

11,000+ years

Riot's own title for Fiddlesticks is the Ancient Fear. That isn't flavor text. It existed before there were people around to be frightened of it, and the scarecrow shape is borrowed rather than what it actually is.

So the oldest hard number in Runeterra's timeline (11,000 years and up) belongs to a jungler most players think of as a bush and a bad surprise. Everything else here has a nation, a family or a mountain attached to it. This one has none of that.

The 2020 rework made all of it explicit and hardly anybody noticed, because in game it still reads as a scare rather than a character.

#1: Soraka

Ageless

And then there's the friendly support who heals your bot lane. Soraka is a celestial being who watched Runeterra from outside it long before she came down, and she gave up that existence deliberately.

Everything else on this list is old within the world. She's older than her involvement in it. Her entire character is that she chose a mortal life out of pity for a species she'd only ever observed, and she's been paying for that choice ever since.

It also explains her better than any of her abilities do. The endless patience, the refusal to fight properly, the willingness to keep giving away her own health to people who feed at level four: that's someone who has watched this go badly a very large number of times and is still trying.

Conclusions

What's fun about the list is how few of them look the part. A socialite, a bear, a rock, an armadillo, a scarecrow and a support who apologizes when she stuns you, and between them they cover most of Runeterra's actual history.

It's also a reminder of how much of the setting happened offscreen. The wars everybody argues about are recent events to half this roster, and several of them were there and would rather not talk about it.

The ones whose age came from dying rather than lasting are in our undead champions list, and the ones whose power outgrew the world entirely are ranked in our strongest champions in lore post.

Every ranking we've argued about is collected on the Top Ten Thursdays hub.