In any event, in Germany/Netherlands there is also another River Leda. In Spain we have the town of Liedena (next to Yesa). Also, and curiously, Lada was the name for Anglo-Saxon legal “purging” rituals on which we will have more (see King Æthelred’s laws) (and, as mentioned the law of Genghis Khan was called Yassa).

There are at least two possibilities here. One is that the Germanic languages have the capacity to originate/maintain both the Led- and the Eld- versions of names (but the Slavic only the latter!). This is the same overreaching argument as in personal names – there we are told that the suffix –mir may be Slavic but it can also be Germanic. But the suffixes -mar and –mer are exclusively Germanic. In more recent times, we see the same argument applied to genetics. The European versions of the haplogroup R1a may be “Slavic”. But they also may be Germanic (or Celtic). However, haplogroups R1b and I1 cannot be Slavic and are Germanic (or Celtic)… (What all of this, frankly, suggests is that the Germans are a mix of at least three different populations, bits and pieces of whose language and genes made their way into the common pot).

Another possibility is that some of these names are simply not Germanic. This would raise another question. Which version is Germanic and which is not. As between the Eld- and the Led-, we’d say that the Led- is the not Germanic version. In that case, the question is whose language does it belong in? And could it be Slavic, Baltic or something else altogether.