The first problem you're going to encounter is that the term "Viking" is pretty vague. Strictly speaking Vikings were raiders, it was a profession not a civilization/culture. Many Vikings were just normal people who needed money or resources and were basically doing a tour as a professional trader and stuff grabber in order to go home and buy more supplies for subsistence farming or logging. Some of them were in fact "professional" Vikings, IE contingents of fighting men that basically fought, traded, raided and killed as a full time profession and they did travel quite a bit, especially at the end of what people term the "viking age". We know they traveled to Spain, Italy, and most of the Mediterranean and interacted with the cultures there, so in some sense they may have met people who had seen or interacted with some exotic animals but that's obviously pure conjecture (based on actual knowledge but still conjecture). The average man in Scandinavia at the time probably didn't know what kind of animals lived in Africa unless he heard a second or third hand story from a trader or a traveler.
If you expand the definition of "Viking" to include Norse associated or Viking descended cultures then you get a little more leeway. The Viking descended bodyguards and warriors who served in the military of the (eastern) Roman Empire would have certainly known about exotic animals, especially since the vast majority of them were kicking around in Constantinople which was a huge center of culture, trade and literature. The same goes with the Pagans/Rus of Eastern Europe who people sometimes consider Viking adjacent (and who certainly were trade allies in some periods and there was some intermixing of blood). They were much more connected to the East by trade and may have even traded in places like Syria and India, where they might have actually SEEN something like an elephant or tiger (evidence for this is pretty weak however).