"Best colours for white wood." Topic

I'm about to paint quite a lot of Viking weapons.
It seems standard for illustrations and reenactors to simply use light white wood. With no major treatment of it.
I mostly deal with muskets and so the wood is treated and often quite dark.
So what would be the best colours for untreated light wooden shafts for spears and axes?

I did an internet search for Viking re enactors, there are loads of images, one would think this would be a good start as historical re enactors usually do extensive research.

Hope this helps, I chose images where there were plenty of wooden spears and axe hafts showing.

To replicate that, I would go with khaki base colour and heavy dry brush of eggshell on top.

All the shafts and hafts above look very (1) modern (like the kind of wood pole I can go buy at the hardware store), and (2) new, as if they had not been out in the rain, dropped in the mud, laid down in the pitch that waterseals a ship, bled/barfed/exposed to various other bodily discharges, etc. Very similar to the modernity and cleanliness of some of the clothes.

I just finished painting up a set of Medieval Northern European civilians and a set of WWII Eastern European partisans. Both together since I wanted drab, dirty colours with a nice brownish/black wash for lowlighting. I made farm implement wood much darker and varied in colour, like the "old" farm implements I remember from my youth (admittedly, slightly more recent that the Medieval era).

Agree that they would age just like modern wooden handled gardening tools do. You do have wooden handled tools, don't you? If not, they go brown very quickly.

I use Vallejo "old wood" color.

Spears were made to be broken. So it makes perfect sense they look new. It's doubtful they would survive a proper battle.
It also makes sense they look modern.
If you take wood cut it down then sand it smooth. That's what it looks like.