We construct Nakajima’s quiver varieties of type A in terms of conjugacy classes of matrices and (non-Slodowy’s) transverse slices naturally arising from affine Grassmannians. In full generality quiver varieties are embedded into Beilinson-Drinfeld Grassmannians of type A. Our construction provides a compactification of Nakajima’s quiver varieties and a decomposition of an affine Grassmannian into a disjoint union of quiver varieties. As an application we provide a geometric version of skew and symmetric (GL(m), GL(n)) duality
