The Folklore of Discworld

winter’, meaning they made a habit of spending a couple of months on the Riviera every year; they went off for half their lives to govern a chunk of far-flung Empire; in extreme cases, they went round the world in eighty days. En route, they tended to acquire pterodactyls, mummies, and bits of old temples. So when an English gentleman travelled, a whole host of trunks, crates, chests, portmanteaux, packing cases, suitcases, dressing-cases, shoe-cases, hatboxes, bandboxes, Gladstone bags, carpet bags, and pistol cases travelled with him. Arriving at his destination, he would leave most of them at the quayside or station and enter his hotel with a mere smattering of hand baggage (say, as much as two porters could carry), telling the manager, ‘My luggagewill follow’. And so it would, pushed on handcarts, or carried on the backs or heads of porters.
    But as time rolled on, the race of porters became mysteriously extinct, and evolutionary pressures caused luggage itself to develop mechanisms enabling it to obey its instinct to follow . The first scientific record of this phenomenon was by Terry himself, when he wrote in 1988:
    Many years ago I saw, in Bath, a very large American lady towing a huge tartan suitcase very fast on little rattly wheels which caught in the pavement cracks and generally gave it a life of its own. At that moment the Luggage was born. Many thanks to that lady … [Dedication of Sourcery ]
    The Discworld environment is hostile to things with little rattly wheels, as we learn in Reaper Man , when it is menaced by an incursion of alien supermarket trolleys. Therefore on the Disc evolution has produced a more elegant solution: the Luggage hurtles across the landscape (and, if need be, through space, time, and dimensions) on several hundred energetic but retractable little legs, always following the person it has adopted as its owner.
    If that were all, one could reasonably claim to understand the origins and characteristics of the Luggage. But it has more mysterious properties, whose equivalents on Earth are obscure, though not beyond all conjecture. Outwardly it looks like a pirate’s treasure-chest, the kind one expects to find brim full of ill-gotten gold and jewels, but its interior is larger than its exterior, and probably does not occupy the same space-time framework. Sometimes it does indeed contain bags of gold, at other times food and drink, or its owner’s neatly folded clothes, smelling of lavender; but when it is in fighting mode it opens its lid menacingly to reveal rows and rows of large square teeth, as white as bleached sycamore or tombstones, and a red, pulsating, mahogany tongue. It is wholly impervious to magic, being itself made of sapient pearwood from the CounterweightContinent, possibly the most concentrated magical substance on the Disc. When angry (as it so often is) it is a fearsome enemy, as was amply demonstrated during a fight in the Broken Drum.
    The door burst open. Two trolls hurried through it, slammed it behind them, dropped the heavy bar across it and fled down the stairs.
    Outside there was a sudden crescendo of running feet. And, for the last time, the door opened. In fact it exploded, the great wooden bar being hurled far across the room and the frame itself giving way.
    Door and frame landed on a table, which flew into splinters. It was then that the frozen fighters noticed that there was something else in the pile of wood. It was a box, shaking itself madly to rid itself of the smashed timber around it …
    A raven swooped down from its perch in the rafters and dived at the wizard [Rincewind], talons open and gleaming.
    It didn’t make it. At about the half-way point the Luggage leapt from its bed of splinters, gaped briefly in mid air, and snapped shut.
    It landed lightly. Rincewind saw its lid open again, slightly. Just far enough for a tongue, large as a palm leaf, red as mahogany, to lick up a few errant feathers. [ The Colour of Magic ]
    It would be reassuring to think that no such devastating piece of carpentry exists, ever has existed, or ever could exist elsewhere in the multiverse. But the myths of olden time and the inspirational insights of modern authors both show that a race of deadly chests has evolved on Earth, with all the destructive power of the Luggage, and none of its usefulness and charm.
    The first hint of their existence comes from Plutarch, a Greek writer living in Rome who died in AD 126; he visited Egypt, whose ancient religion