The Luggage
| The Luggage | |
 | |
| Name | The Luggage |
| Race | |
| Age | |
| Occupation | Carrying stuff around, Protecting its owner. |
| Physical appearance | A large brass bound wooden chest with hundreds of little pink legs. Is sometimes shown to have Sycamore white teeth and a long mahogany red tongue. |
| Residence | Wherever its current owner lives |
| Death | |
| Parents | |
| Relatives | Owned by Rincewind. |
| Children | Several smaller trunks. |
| Marital Status | |
| Appearances | |
| Books | All books in the Rincewind Series. |
| Cameos | Unseen Academicals |
The Luggage is a trunk with legs. It is made of sapient pearwood, and is immensely faithful. Its first owner was a tourist called Twoflower, who at the end of The Light Fantastic, gave the Luggage over to Rincewind as a parting gift. It appears to hold many dimensions, and has often swallowed people that have tried to hurt its owner. It always has a pair of fresh underwear ready smelling slightly of lavender. It has also been used as a mode of transportation by Cohen the Barbarian in The Light Fantastic, and it will even cross dimensions to be with its owner, as it does in Eric.
There is some inconsistency in the books regarding the origins of The Luggage. In The Light Fantastic it is established that it came from a Wandering Shop, meaning it could've originated from any place (or past time) on the Disc or even possibly from another world. In Interesting Times however, we learn that many other (albeit smaller) Luggages live on the Counterweight Continent, allowing it to start a family there.
In order to eat the enemies of its owner, the Luggage will usually lure them with a trap, such as raising its lid invitingly to reveal piles of gleaming gold. The last sight many unlucky men see at the mercy of the Luggage are large, tombstone-like teeth and a huge red tongue. However, if left behind somewhere and forced to catch up with its owner, the Luggage often just tears through a place leaving a wake of destruction and completely swallowing everything in its path. A person can survive inside the Luggage, however, as mentioned above.
The Luggage is often seen as a malevolent entity and has made a definite impression on the faculty of Unseen University. Twoflower originally bought the Luggage in one of those shops, but, while in the Agatean Empire the Luggage met others of its kind and has now mated and reproduced in Interesting Times. Its unceasing loyalty to its master can also be seen as a good trait, and it has often helped its owners out of many different situations- usually by stomping, jumping up and down on, or swallowing whatever is threatening its master.
The Luggage was briefly worshipped by the Tezuman Empire as a god in Eric when the Luggage crushes their former god on the top of a pyramid. They rationally decided that if something can crush their god that easily, it would probably be wise to start worshipping it instead. However, when the Luggage never returned, despite all the worshipping they did, the Tezumans killed their priests and switched to enlightened atheism instead.
The Luggage even once swallowed the Octavo (at the end of The Light Fantastic), but we later learn (in Sourcery) that it "sulked for three days" and later spat it out.
It makes a brief appearance in Unseen Academicals as a prospective member of the Unseen University football team, though it is ultimately disqualified from joining.
Cohen the Barbarian once attacked the Luggage in The Light Fantastic because he was "scared of it." However, this is not quite is surprising when one considers the psychology of the individual: Cohen's normal state of mind is to attack anything that moves. Something that scares him would be a prime target, as attacking it would eventually end up with either he, it, or both of them being dead, removing the source of fear regardless of the outcome. More importantly, seeing piles of gold is undoubtedly a lure for Cohen.
Annotations
Pratchett has stated on several occasions that the Luggage was created from the time he watched a woman's suitcase wobbling across the tiles of an airport. He has also stated however that the airport story and several others were fabricated for the benefit of interviewers and quite frankly he can't remember the precise origin of the Luggage. He had earlier used a similar idea when designing role-playing games for friends, a walking trunk which could carry all the players' possessions and would follow any instructions given to it but only the instructions given to it (rather like a golem), which inevitably led it to absentmindedly walking off the edge of a cliff as soon as the quest party got distracted. (Source: The Pratchett Portfolio: A Compendium of Discworld Characters).
Technically, the Luggage acts as a classic Bag of Holding but with the added bonus that items of laundry stuffed in will also come out cleaned, pressed and smelling faintly of lavender.