Speaking of the Odyssey, I'm currently working through a holiday gift: Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey (and the Iliad) by Eva Brann. No idea whether it'd be useful for you, but it's giving me some new ideas as a mythminer -- though her interpretation of Hades as the storehouse of mortal stories is ... eccentric. So far my only quibble is her claim that Odysseus is only the second mortal after Heracles to return from Hades alive -- she later qualifies this by asserting that Orpheus did it later (on what grounds??), but that still overlooks Theseus.

---L.