 Tolkien himself never used the exact phrase "a mythology for England", but he often made statements to that effect, writing to one reader that his intention in writing the Middle-earth stories was "to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own".In the early 20th century, proponents of Irish nationalism like the poet William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and others had succeeded in linking in the public mind traditional Irish folk tales of fairies and elves to Irish national identity while denigrating English folk tales as being merely derivative of Irish folk tales.This had prompted a backlash by English writers, leading to a savage war of words about which nation had the more authentic and better fairy tales with for example the English essayist G. K. Chesterton engaging in a series of polemical essays with Yeats over the question of the superiority of Irish vs. English fairy tales.