Old Heapy

After posting Honoring the God yesterday, I came across W.K.C. Guthrie (1906-1981), The Greeks and Their Gods (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950; rpt. 1956), p. 88 (on Hermes): [W]e shall align ourselves firmly with Professor Nilsson when he declares, "The name is one of the few that are etymologically transparent and means 'he of the stone-heap'."1 Hermes then is an ancient god of the countryside, named by the Greeks from the ἕρμα, also called ἑρμαῖον which was a cairn or heap of stones. These cairns served as landmarks, and can already be seen as such in Homer, where Eumaios, describing to Telemachos how he has seen a ship, indicates his position by saying, "I had reached that point above the city where there is a ἑρμαῖος λόφος2 "A hill of Hermes"? Yes, but also "a mound in the form of a cairn". The Etymologicum Magnum defines ἑρμαῖον as "heap of stones, and in general stones by the wayside", and the scholiast on the passage in the Odyssey explains the ἑρμαῖος λόφος in the same way, and…