Kierkegaard’s journals, notebooks and loose papers represent a generally neglected part of his vast corpus of writings. The present two-part article tells the story of this material from the time of Kierkegaard’s death until the creation of the new Danish edition, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. This first part explains the general nature of the surviving material. An account is further given of the long road that Kierkegaard’s Nachlass took from its discovery upon his death in 1855 to its current home at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. The goal is to provide little-known factual information about this large body of material and to encourage scholars to use it more frequently in their studies.