This study picks up current debates about perspective and meaning in Wolfram von Eschenbach's »Willehalm«. Adapting Mika Bal's model of narratology, it concentrates on two major complexes - characters and narrator - which it treats as fluid, intersecting entities. The former, uniquely for German narrative genres of the period, emerge as three-dimensional characters whose voices converse with that of a subjective narrator moulded in an era of developing fictionality. The result is a narrative dynamic which represents a vibrant new literary hermeneutic for the vernacular.