Odyssey books whatever we had to do to finish it

I am finally done with the Odyssey and looking at other posts by people I have followed in this class I am only the third person to finish it. This isn't anything new to me - I was actually surprised to see that two others had other had already finished it. But to the book - no, poem - itself. They actually used a different name for Dawn! Instead of rosy-fingered Dawn, they called it at one point rosy-fingered morn, and then they said gold-enthroned Dawn. I was surprised that Dawn was in a gold throne - she seems like a minor goddess, and where would they get her a gold throne. Next, is Rumour, mentioned late in the book, a metaphor, a goddess, or was it just a typo that it was capitalized? Also, is Mentor - the form that Minerva takes so often in the book, probably the most favored of all her forms - a real person that Minerva is copying, or is Mentor completely made up, and so is the whole story about him? It also seemed odd and abrupt when Ulysses was at war for on the last page and it just ended immediately. Except for the gory description, I thought it was awesome how Ulysses just whipped around after shooting through the twelve axes and killed Antinous. Just why didn't the story get into the part where Ulysses brought the oar to that weird country, sacrificed a bunch of animals, and slowly died somehow? I didn't really want the story to get much longer, but it was still a question that was floating above my head in the end.