Forum: scifi.stackexchange.com
Tags: <star-wars><star-wars-legends><lightsaber>
Title: When did lightsabers first appear in the Star Wars timeline?
Question: Where do we first see/read about a lightsaber in the Star Wars universe (EU and Legends count)?    I mean this from an in-universe chronological perspective, not publication/release order.  It’s a simple question, but I've searched some existing question and answers on here and a few other sites online (yes, including wookieepedia...) but have not found anything useful yet.

Answers:
sents: text: In the Legends continuity, we first see a "Forcesaber" in the Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi series, which takes place about 26,000 years before the Battle of Yavin.
text: We see our first true lightsaber in Star Wars: The Old Republic , appropriately titled the " First Blade .
text: " It was much older than the Republic (founded approximately 25,000 BBY), but its exact age is unknown.
text: In regular canon, the first lightsaber we see is Qui-Gon Jin's (by a split-second) in The Phantom Menace.
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/51226/Rogue Jedi
score: 16
sents: text: Legends
text: According to Wookieepedia - 15,500 BBY if considering just the technical aspects if not total practicality By the time of the Duinuogwuin Contention around 15,500 BBY,
text: Jedi studies and researches with "frozen blaster" technology yielded success; they developed a method to generate a focused beam of energy that arced in a circumferential path back to its source, creating a controlled energy circuit and leading to the first portable high-energy blades.
text: However, these preliminary lightsabers were highly unstable and inefficiently guzzled energy from a belt-mounted power supply; they could only be used for a brief duration before overheating.
text: As a consequence of these flaws, the first lightsabers were little more than ceremonial objects, seldom worn, and much less utilized.
text: Source:
text: The New Essential Chronology (2005)
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/55637/NKCampbell
score: 7
sents: text: As Legends canon is accepted, the date goes back a very, very long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away).
text: Protosabers , mentioned in Nathan's answer, were certainly an early (circa 15,500 BBY, as he stated) design of lightsaber -- but they were based on an even earlier design.
text: The Rakata Empire created the Forcesabers , lightsabers essentially fueled by Dark Side Force energy.
text: Their non-Rakata Force users ("Force Hounds") would construct their own Forcesabers and attune special focus gems to their own Force signatures, like the Jedi in later millenia.
text: The Rakata themselves used forcesabers in a force pike configuration.
text: However, the Forcesabers were created thousands of years before
text: The Tho Yor Arrival (circa 36,453 BBY), which itself marked the beginning of the proliferation of Force usage.
text: The Jed'aii descendents of those taught in the Tho Yor pyramid ships would attempt to use Forcesabers only at great risk -- the Dark Side influence of the sabers made them highly corruptive.
text: This, in turn, spurred the development of the aforementioned Protosabers which, being powered by a power pack rather than Dark Side Force energy, did not corrupt the user.
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/None/
score: 5
sents: text: Considering only EU novels and stories, if you look at the book timeline page, the first novel has no lightsabers, but the second one, Star Wars:
text: Lost Tribe of the Sith: The Collected Stories , says on page 3 "The half smirk was a memento from a Jedi Lightsaber swipe years earlier...".
text: so this book, which is just a collection of short stories, is the first chronological reference to lightsabers.
text: The stories in this collection take place between 5000 BBY and 2975 BBY.
text: The next reference after these short stories is in the novel The Old Republic: Revan .
text: As for canon material, Phantom Menace is the first instance at the year of 32 BBY.
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/45549/Hatandboots
score: 3
sents: text: See other responses for Legends canon.
text: For Abrams's canon, this may be explained in the upcoming movies since Luke was in search of the first Jedi Temple.
answer_details: author: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/53701/liljoshu
score: 1

Summary of the answers:
There are mentions of "Forcesabers", an early type of Lightsaber, many thousands of years before the Battle of Yavin, however, the first appearance of a Lightsaber appears to be either in The Phantom Menace, which is set 32 years before the Battle of Yavin, or in the film Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Opinions vary wildly, with some contributors identifying a time 26,000 years before the Battle of Yavin, for example, whilst others place the date as recently as 2,975 BBY. Clarification may come in future movies.