In four closely interwoven chapters, this study interprets the texts of one of the longest-lived narrative traditions of the German Middle Ages and attempts a new description of the adventure-filled Dietrich epic from a reception-aesthetic perspective. In doing so, the study gains new insights in the field of narrative constants of the corpus and shows why the texts have enjoyed such long-lived success. The study can also be understood as a test to determine just how ‘literally’ medieval schematic literature can be taken.